In peril of change; essays written in time of tranquillity

THE LIBRARY
OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA
RIVERSIDE

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

ESSAYS WRITTEN IN
TIME OF TRANQUILLITY

BY

C. F. G. M^TERMAN, M.A.

FELLOW or CHRIST'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

" We cannot but acknowledge that nut are not yet at rest : nor
can ive believe ive have yet enjoyed or seen enough to accomplish
the ends of God."

THE PARLIAMENT TO THE PEOPLE or ENGLAND, 1653

NEW YORK
B. W. HUEBSCH

150 NASSAU STREET

3

(All rights reserved.)

Co
NOEL BUXTON

IN MEMORY OP TEN TEARS OF FRIENDSHIP
AND EFFORT IN A COMMON CAUSE.

PBEFACE

essays in this book represent an effort made in
_ a time of tranquillity, to estimate forces which are
making for change. Some are attempts to examine the
ideals of the age immediately past, as one by one the
voices of the nineteenth century have sunk into silence.
Some deal with the life of the present, endeavouring to
reflect some immediate impression of the panorama of
life as it passes by. And some are concerned with the
future, seeking to interpret, in literature, in religion, in
social ideals, those obscure beginnings which are to
direct the progress of the years to come.

In every case I have been less interested in the
manner of saying than in the thing said. Literature
has only been called in to pronounce its verdict upon
the business of life. It is this business of life, the
experience of a hurrying present, which is the one
absorbing question : the actual high effort, apathy or
despair crowded into that interval when to-morrow is
becoming yesterday. To some the procession passes
as a pageant, to others as a masquerade, to others again
as a funeral march with the sound of solemn music.
But to all in that moment a world has perished, a world
been born.

xi

PREFACE

If the note is in general sombre, with the sadness
of things more emphatic than their splendour, I can
only plead an experience more than usually complex
and baffling, spent in communication less with the
triumphs of civilisation tlian with its failures.

Expectancy and surprise are the notes of the age.
Expectancy belongs by nature to a time balanced
uneasily between two great periods of change. On the
one hand is a past still showing faint survivals of
vitality ; on the other is the future but hardly coming
to birth. The years as they pass still appear as years
of preparation, a time of waiting rather than a time
of action. Surprise, again, is probably the first im-
pression of all who look on, detached from the
eager traffic of man. The spectator sees him per-
forming the same antics in the same grave fashion
as in all the past: heaping up wealth which another
shall inherit, following pleasure which turns to dust
in the mouth, and the end weariness : thinking, as
always, that he will endure for ever, and calling after
his own name the place which shall know him no more.
But surprise passes into astonishment in confronting
the particular and special features of the age. Here is
a civilisation becoming ever more divorced from Nature
and the ancient sanities, protesting through its literature
a kind of cosmic weariness. Society which had started
on its mechanical advance and the aggrandisement of
material goods with the buoyancy of an impetuous life
confronts a poverty which it can neither ameliorate nor
destroy, and an organised discontent which may yet
prove the end of the Western civilisation. Faith in
the invisible seems dying, and faith in the visible is
proving inadequate to the hunger of the soul. The
city state, concentrated in such a centre as London,

xii

PREFACE

remains as meaningless and as impossible to co-ordinate
with any theory of spiritual purposes as the law of
gravitation itself.

Experience in the heart of such a universe of neces-
sity takes upon itself a character of bewilderment.
Those whom I loved have died : and the miracle of
their parting has seemed more strange than the miracle
of their presence. I have seen so many sunsets, so
many radiant dawns. This man has failed and that
succeeded, and both have grown tired of it all. "What
right have I to grieve," as Thoreau said, "who have
not ceased to wonder?"

And I think that I am not alone in longing for a time
when literature will once more be concerned with life,
and politics with the welfare of the people : and religion
fall back again upon reality : and pity and laughter
return into the common ways of men.

xni

CONTENTS

PAGE

AFTER THE REACTION . 1

DE MORTUI8: 87

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY . . . . .89

J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE . . . . .45

HENRY SIDGWICK . . . . . .51

FREDERIC MYERS ..... 60

GEORGE GISSING . . . . . .68

SPENCER AND CARLYLE : A COMPARISON . . 74

DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE : A CONTRAST . . .97

THE CHURCH MILITANT : TEMPLE, WESTCOTT, CHEIGHTON,
DOLLING . . . . . 115

BEFORE THE DAWN: . . , .145

JUNE IN ENGLAND . . . . 147

IN DEJECTION NEAR TOOTING .... 155

THE BURDEN OF LONDON .... 159

THE NEW REVOLUTION ..... 167
THE BLASPHEMY OF OPTIMISM . . . 173

CHICAGO AND FRANCIS ..... 180
THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN . . . 190

XV

CONTENTS

MM
THE CHALLENGE OF TIME . . . .213

OF DEATH AND PITY 233

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY . . .257

IN PERIL OF CHANGE . 301

XVI

AFTER THE REACTION

B

" Yea, if no morning must behold
Man, other than were they now cold,
And other deeds than past deeds done,
Nor" any near or far-off sun
Salute him risen and sunlike-souled,
Free, boundless, fearless, perfect, one,

Let man's world die like worlds of old,
And here in heaven's sight only be
The sole sun on the worldless sea."

SWINBURNE.

AFTER THE REACTION

LITERATUEE as detached as is the literature
of to-day from the middle and working classes,
the unconscious rulers of England, would appear to he
independent of the actual processes of political and social
change. A few vigorous story-tellers, a group of writers
of pleasant verse, some young and clever journalists,
will initiate a literary "movement"; which will take
itself seriously, parade a pomp and circumstance, and
continue until the respectabilities of advancing age, and
often, alas ! the revelations of a failing inspiration, have
once again demonstrated the triumph of time and change.
Yet this emphasis of aloofness is not the whole truth.
Literature, indeed, has no direct concern with the dust
of the party struggle, with bills of licensing or local
government. But the larger transitions of the period,
the spirit which underlies some definite upheaval, whose
appearance in the world of action astonishes the un-
thinking, is certain to find itself first articulate in the
universe of art. Estimate in that universe a vital move-
ment of revolt from some accepted tradition or ideal;
you will be estimating a force which in no long time is
destined to enter into the play of outward affairs and to
mould the courses of the world.

No better example could be advanced than the history
3

AFTER THE REACTION

of the Reaction in the later years of the nineteenth
century. Weary of the long effort of reform, a little
bored by the strenuousness of the appeal to disinterested
causes, conscious of the possession of unparalleled means
of enjoyment, and of great possessions, the nation was
evidently prepared for a new spirit, a new inspiration.
That spirit and inspiration came with the Reaction ;
whose literature some fifteen years ago revealed the
only confident and secure proclamation of any kind
of definite appeal. As the former enthusiasms subsided
and the former systems were found unsatisfying ; as, in
a word, the new England disentangled itself from the
old ; so the message proclaimed by a few men of genius,
and diffused through a thousand obscure channels in
Press and platform, became suddenly arresting : and
now stands crystallised as the product characteristic of
those extraordinary years.

The contrast was glaring between the literature of the
earlier Victorian era and the literature of the closing
days. The old had been cosmopolitan. The new was
Imperial. The old had proclaimed the glory of the
" one imperishable cause," allied through all lands ;
the struggle for liberty against the accumulated atheisms
of a dozen centuries. The new was frankly Tory ; with
the Tory scoffing at the futilities of freedom, described
now as a squalid uprising of the discontented against
their masters. The old had been " Liberal " ; in that
wide definition including such extremes as a Browning
and a Tennyson. The new branded Liberalism as but
a gigantic fraud by which the weak deluded the strong
into an abnegation of their natural domination. The
old had been humanitarian ; preaching, if with a some-
what thick voice, yet with a sanguine air, the coming of
the golden age. War would be abandoned as irrational.

4

AFTER THE REACTION

A free and universal trade would bind the nations into one
brotherhood. The sweet reasonableness of the English
character would shine forth its radiance through all
the envious nations of the world. The new had no such
hopes or dreams. It revolted always against the domina-
tion of the bourgeois. It estimated commerce as a means
of conflict and a weapon of offence. It clamoured for the
ancient Barbarism ; and delighted in war ; and would
spread an English civilisation, not by the diffusion of
its ideas but by the destruction of its enemies. It was
a message of vigour and revolt congruous to a nation
wearied of the drabness of its uniform successes ; with
the dissatisfaction and vague restlessness which come
both to individuals and communities after long periods
of order and tranquillity. To the friends of progress the
dominance of such a spirit seemed of the elements of
tragedy. Literature, after its long alliance with the
party of reform, had deliberately deserted to the enemy.
In the minds of the few faithful the dismay was some-
what similar to that aroused in the defenders of the
inviolate city, when the Shekinah departed from the
courts of the temple and passed over to the camp of its
foes.

This new spirit of the Reaction gathered itself
especially round two men, each possessing more than
a touch of genius Mr. W. E. Henley and Mr. Budyard
Kipling. Mr. Henley's denunciation of the accepted
codes of life, the thirst for blood and violence of one
physically debarred from adventure, became reflected in
a hundred eager followers, who plied the axe and
hammer of sneer and gibe round the humanitarian
ideal and the house of the good citizen. Mr. Kipling's
proclamation of the Imperial race co-operating with God
in the bloody destruction of alien peoples was interpreted

5

AFTER THE REACTION

into the commonplaces of a journalism demanding above
all things sensation. The toiler of the cities in his life
of grey monotony, labouring for another's wealth, found
existence suddenly slashed with crimson. And every
morning the astonished clerk was exalted by the intelli-
gence of his devastation of Afghanistan, or civilisation
of Zanzibar, or slaughter of ten thousand fantastic
Dervishes in a night and a day.

It was a literature of the security of a confident
triumph; with that quality which distinguishes the
work of a dawn from the work of a declining day.
Its appeal was to enduring elements of human emotion.
It proclaimed the supremacy of England, a mother,
worth dying and living for; her children seeking
danger as a bride, searching all the confines of the
world; encountering and joyfully mastering enemies
and natural forces, the winds and the seas and the
terrors of elemental things. There were visions of ships
steering through deep waters and harvests gathered
from all seas ; of the pioneers whose bones have marked
the track for the advancing army that this might follow
where these had trod ; of the flag of England descried
amid mist and cold or under the Southern sun as every-
where triumphant by the testimony of all the winds of
heaven. It was a literature of intoxication ; adequate
to a nation which, having conquered the world in a fit of
absence of mind, had suddenly become conscious of the
splendour of its achievement. Small wonder that to
the eyes of the men of the time there came with it
something of the force of a gospel ; as the boundaries of
their thought lifted to disclose larger horizons than they
had ever known.

It was a literature, on the other hand, of a rather
forced ferocity; of an academic enthusiasm for the

6

AFTER THE REACTION

noise and trappings of war; the work of men who
despised death because there was present in their
minds, not death as a reality but only death as an
idea. It preached a boastful insularity ; with a whole-
hearted contempt for disloyal Ireland or the cretins of
the continent. The Briton was revealed to himself, a
majestic figure, lord of the earth, who, with the approba-
tion of God, but by the power of his own right arm, had
gotten himself the victory. It presented a figure of the
Imperial race, like Nietzsche's Overman, trampling over
the ineffective, crushing opposing nations, boasting an
iron supremacy, administering an iron justice. It
thought scorn of all the ideals of philanthropy of the
middle classes, with their timidities and reticence and
dull routine ; of the poor with the clumsiness of their
ineffectual squalor. " More chops, bloody ones with
gristle," so a critic has summed up in Mr. Kipling's
own words, his demand from life. It neglected and
despised the ancient pieties of an older England, the
little isle set in its silver sea. Greatness became big-
ness ; specific national feeling parochial. Imperial
Destiny replaced national well-being ; and men were
no longer asked to pursue the "iust" course, but to
approve the "inevitable."

The thing lasted only so long as it could keep
divorced from real things and confined to its world
of illusion. While British wars consisted of battues of
blacks, with the minimum of loss and pain to ourselves,
the falsity of the atmosphere of Mr. Kipling's battle tales
was undiscoverable. The blind and gibbering maniac at
the end of " The Light that Failed," who shrieks,
"Give 'em Hell, men, oh, give 'em Hell," from the
security of an armoured train, while his companions
annihilate their enemies by pressing the button of

7

AFTER THE REACTION

a machine gun, seemed not only a possible but even
a reputable figure. The sport of such " good hunting "
" the lordliest life on earth " was not recounted by
the historian of the hunted, the tribes of the hills whose
land was laid desolate and wells choked up and palm-
trees cut down and villages destroyed, who were joyfully
butchered to make an Imperial holiday. Their verdict
upon such "hunting" might have been less exuberant.
As Newman said in his defence of Catholics in England,
"Lions would have fared better, had lions been the
artists."

With the outbreak of real war and some apprehension
of its meaning the spell snapped. Directly Mr. Kipling
commenced to write of the actual conflict in South
Africa, the note suddenly jarred and rang false. His
judgment was found to be concerned not with war but
with the idea of war ; the conception in the brain of a
journalist. The jauntiness and cocksureness, the surface
swagger, were suddenly confronted with realities ;
Death and Loss and Longing. " There was a good
killing at Paardeberg; the first satisfactory killing of
the whole war " ; this attitude immediately disclosed
its essential vulgarity; a grimace from the teeth out-
wards ; war as viewed from Capel Court or Whitechapel,
or any other place where men are noisy and impotent.
Heal war gave indeed a revelation of high sacrifice, the
coming of the " fire of Prometheus " into the common
ways of men; flaming up under the stress of a vast
upheaval in the conflict of life and of death. It was not
given to the Apostles of the New Imperialism to estimate
or even to understand those deeper tides of the human
soul. Their conception was of war carried on in the
spirit of the music-hall comedy ; the men at the close of
the struggle wiping their hands which have successfully

8

AFTER THE REACTION

gouged out the eyes of their enemies, while they hum the
latest popular song. It was left for another poet of a
different spirit, Mr. Henry Newbolt, to voice the common-
place of an unchanging tragedy in the only memorable
verse called forth by this three years' struggle.

With the coming of a war which it had so furiously
demanded, the literature of the Eeaction fell, first into
shrillness, then into silence. Read to-day, the whole
thing stands remote and fantastic, the child of a time
infinitely far away. Of its authors, some are dead ; and
some continue a strange shadowy life in an alien time.
Mr. Kipling compiles such mournful productions as
" Traffics and Discoveries." But the pipe fails to
awaken any responsive echoes. Even those who before
had approved now turn away their heads. He appears
like one dancing and grimacing in the midst of the
set grave faces of a silent company. And so of the
others. Mr. Street, one of the briskest of the disciples
who once were young, contributes long letters on Tariff
Reform to the columns of the Times. They suggest
nothing so much as the return from beyond the grave
of the tenuous phantoms of the Greek heroes. The
spectacle is not without its pathos. We have not
changed, these writers may complain. Here is the
same music which you once approved, which once
moved you clumsily to caper in the market place.
What has caused the charm suddenly to cease ?

It has ceased is the reply because your world of
phantasy has been judged and condemned by real
things ; because with that judgment a new Spirit is
dawning in England.

This new Spirit should make its first appearance in
9

AFTER THE REACTION

literature. And the question immediately arises: can
we estimate to-day anything confident and vital which
can be interpreted as the work of the pioneers, the
Spring of a Summer to be?

We shall find, I think, on examination two classes of
such writings. The first is of those who growing up
under the spirit and dominance of the Reaction, have
yet refused to give it their allegiance ; a Literature of
protest coloured by a sense of isolation from the ideals
of its age. The second is of those developing when
that dominance is passing away, and who exhibit there-
fore all the security and triumph which comes from the
conviction of a winning cause.

Of the first, the most noteworthy name is of one who
has always stood apart and alone, whose verse is
everywhere conscious of a popular indifference and
estrangement. The work of Mr. William Watson will
be judged in the future with that of Mr. Rudyard
Kipling as representing a conflict of ideas which go
down to the basis of man's being. The very methods
reflect the diversified ideals. The one is detached,
elusive, cold ; standing apart upon the height ; content
in a serenity and a fastidious taste in words. The
other is coloured, barbaric, human ; tumid and rhetori-
cal; moving and rejoicing in the every-day world;
vital, appealing and alive. The one "magnificently
unperturbed," preaches always a vehement, if austere,
virtue ; judging the present by the ancient traditions of
an older time, by a past consecration of effort and
sympathy in disinterested service. The other beats
with the emotion of a crowd ; from the midst of which,
and as its voice, he directs men's gaze towards an
illimitable future.

And the changes of the time could be no better
10

AFTER THE REACTION

illustrated than in the comparison of two appeals.
In "The Purple East," contrasted with "The Seven
Seas," the divergence is manifest hetween one who
is speaking the mind of a nation and one ohviously
heyond its sympathies. Mr. Watson demanded with
the violence of despair that England should accept the
obligations of her deliberate responsibility, and embark
in the spirit of the crusaders upon the vindication of
an unchanging justice. And the note of a baffling
indifference and defeat is over all the volume. Mr.
Kipling sang of the glories and the greatness of an
Empire swollen into one-eighth of the habitable world
and splashed around the seven seas ; and every line of
his vigorous verse seems punctuated with the applause
of invisible multitudes.

Ten years after appear two other volumes, almost
contemporaneous. The time has changed. The
wheel has come full circle. In " For England " there
breathes through every page the consciousness of vindi-
cation, an appeal to a judgment which even now has
proclaimed an honourable acquittal. In " The Five
Nations" the rhetoric has passed into bombast; an
audience slipping away or turning their backs is every-
where apparent. The sneers at^E.difference, the heaped-
up insults upon "fools" and "oafs," the jibes and
abuse hurled upon a nation which will not rise to the
new gospel, stamp upon the whole mournful volume the
consciousness of failure. In the one is the jealousy of
the discarded favourite :

"And ye vaunted your fathomless power and ye flaunted

your iron pride,

Ere ye fawned on the younger nations for the men who
could shoot and ride.
11

AFTER THE REACTION

Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented

your soul
With the flannelcd fools at the wicket and the muddied

oafs at the goal."

In the other is the dignity of confidence secure in an
ultimate verdict which is independent of man's
applause :

" Friend, call me what you will : no jot care I :
I that shall stand for England till I die.

* * * *

The England from whose side I have not swerved ;
The immortal England whom I, too, have served,
Accounting her all living lands above,
In Justice, and in Mercy, and hi Love."

With the passing of the bitter days we may hope
for an increased consciousness of sympathy with an
England immortal and secure, restored to sanity and
desirable life after the fever of its dreams.

Next to the work of this isolated figure you may turn
to the work of a school. One original inspiration has
survived through all the clamorous days, in that
particular literature of Ireland which has disdained the
noise of the Reaction. That literature boasts many men
and women of rare and delicate talent : one, Mr. George
Russell, of a real if remote genius ; and one, Mr. "W. B.
Yeats, with the power of a universal appeal.

Mr. Yeats stands for the genius of the Celt; not
unmixed, indeed, with a mysticism culled from other
sources ; but more than any other individual writer now
representing the soul of a nation. He is the outstand-
ing figure in a literary movement which is one of the
few vital things in the world of to-day. The movement

12

AFTER THE REACTION

is the child of a Nationalism which is the antithesis
of Imperialism, whose scene is set in one of the great
tragic failures of the world. From the heart of that
failure, from a race as it would seem visibly dying
in its own land, Mr. Yeats and his comrades pro-
claimed their judgment of the forces to which has been
given domination. This " progress," with its noise
and bustle, its material opulence, its destruction of
all old and beautiful and quiet things, stand ever-
lastingly condemned by one whose first search is for
the Hose of an undying beauty, whose concern is
only with the ardours and hungers of the soul. He
looks out upon the tumult and the shouting, the noise
and splendour of passing things. He learns that
Tenderness, Compassion, Humility, those white- winged
angels of healing, find no place in this hot and heavy
air. He stands aside, an apostle of defeat ; of defeat
yet triumphant in its fall ; deliberately proclaiming
allegiance to the vanquished cause. " They went out
to battle but they always fell " is written over all this
haunting and musical verse, this haunting and appealing
prose. And into the old legends, mingled of dreams and
shadows, from twilights and dim dawns, the mystery
and the sadness of moving waters and hidden places,
the wind among the reeds, the rose-leaves falling in the
garden, he has woven, with something of the quality of
magic, all the sorrow of an elegy over a doomed and
passing race.

Beauty and the love of beauty, the old things,
visions in the sunset, dreams by the fire light, are
passing from the world. The note of that passing and
of the judgment of the destructive forces enters into a
kind of exultant rejection of a civilisation which carries
even in its victory the seeds of decay; which has

13

AFTER THE REACTION

received its heart's desire and leanness in the soul.
Here is the defiance of one who notes that all the noise
and triumph of his conquerors will one day also become
ashes and a little dust.

So the dominant note of the work of his attractive,
wayward genius is this sadness and appeal. All the
soul's longing turns from the call of the wind and
shadowy waters, from a world ravaged by change and
time, to the "Land of the ever young," and the "Land
of Heart's Desire." " It is time now to go into the
glens," he can say with Don-nacha'Ban, " for gloom is
falling on the mountains and mists shroud the hills,"
" There is enough evil in the crying of wind " ; " For
the world's more full of weeping than you can under-
stand " : so runs the record of ruin and pain :

"We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,
The grey cairn on the hill when day sinks drowned in dew,
Being weary of the world's Empires bow down to you. "

Weariness of the world's Empires ; the " vanity of
Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire " ; a defiant
estrangement from all the courses of the world, become
visibly flat, stale and unprofitable, are written over all this
literature of protest and sorrow. Beauty passes as a
dream ; and " we and the labouring world are passing
by " ; and the consolation chiefly rests in the knowledge
that one day all will have gone, good and evil, man's
laughter and his tears, the yearning which can never
be satisfied. "God's wars" will end, not in victory,
but in silence.

" And when at last defeated in His wars,
They have gone down under the same white stars,
We shall no longer hear the little cry
Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor die."
14

AFTER THE REACTION

In his later work, indeed, Mr. Yeats has proclaimed a
real Eastern Nihilism. He sings the triumph of Death
and nothingness. Du Bellay's " Le Grandeur du
Rien " is set up as the consummation of all things.
And the soul rejoices that even "Le Grand tout " into
which " all other things pass and lose themselves " is
" some time itself to perish and pass away." In that
remarkable play, "Where there is Nothing," which
perplexed the inhabitants of Kensington on its perform-
ance and provided food for the humours of the dramatic
critics, there is an almost passionate expression of this
hatred of " making things," this hunger for the primi-
tive abyss and void. Paul Ruttledge, the hero, is a
kind of wild Tolstoy preaching the return, not to nature,
but to nothingness. He seeks satisfaction first in the
escape from the artificiality of society to life with the
tinkers on the open road ; later in the asceticism of the
monastery ; and then again to the simplicities of the
ruined abbey and bare subsistence from day to day.
His followers who have been attracted by his preaching
totally misunderstand this new gospel of despair, and
are found planning to build up again all which he has
destroyed. In the passage, which forms the climax of
the play, the apostle of Nihilism proclaims his faith :

" Oh ! yes, I understand, you would weave them
together like this (weaves the osiers in and out), you
would add one thing to another, laws and money and
Church and bells, till you had got everything back
again that you had escaped from. But it is my business
to tear things asunder like this (tears pieces from the
basket), and this, and this "

" At last," he cries, in the crypt of the church, " we
must put out the light of the Sun and of the Moon, and
all the light of the World and the World itself. We

15

AFTER THE REACTION

must destroy the World ; we must destroy everything
that has Law and Number, for where there is nothing,
there is God."

Yet at other times this assertion of the ultimate
triumph of cold and darkness gives place to a hope
that the weak things of the world may even at the
end overcome the strong; and Beauty and Romance
and the old Desires of the heart and the Vision
of far spiritual horizons return again into the ways
of men. " The movement of thought," Mr. Yeats
proclaims, " which has made the good citizen, or has
been made by him, has surrounded us with comfort and
safety and with vulgarity and insincerity. One finds
alike its energy and its weariness in churches which have
substituted a system of morals for spiritual ardour, in
pictures which have substituted conventionally pretty
faces for the disquieting revelations of sincerity, in
poets who have set the praises of those things good
citizens think praiseworthy above a dangerous delight
in beauty for the sake of beauty."

But while the old is crumbling the new is building.
Sometimes the hope is triumphant that " the golden
age is to come again and men's hearts and the weather
to grow gentle, as time fades into eternity " ; and at
times a confidence awakens in the coming of "a
change, which, begun in our time or not for centuries,
will one day make all lands holy lands again."

Mr. Yeats, in part as the expression of a national
movement, more, perhaps, through the compelling force
of his talent, has attained even under the uncongenial
skies of the Reaction some recognition of his sincerity
and power. An English author, Mr. H. W. Nevinson,
no less individual and arresting, and far less remote

16

AFTER THE REACTION

from ideals definitely English, has waited longer for
acceptance. Like Mr. Yeats, he belongs to a period of
protest protest against a dominant spirit whose de-
parture seemed far distant. This protest has taken
varied forms. He has translated into literature the
appeal of the poor against the cruel indifference and,
perhaps, more cruel " charity " of the rich. He has
voiced the protest of the little nations with their
particular civilisations against an Imperialism which
rolls as a Juggernaut car, guided by sightless eyes,
not deliberately but clumsily, over all their variegated
lives. He has set up for judgment by the ancient, way-
ward things of man's existence, its high ardours, its
delight in the charged spirit of emotion, love and
battle and the open road, a civilisation spreading its
by-laws and decencies over all the broken lands,
and estimating its progress by its expenditure upon
sanitation and the dimensions of its public lavatories.
Against such "progress" he has appealed always for
those elements of transfiguring flame by which alone
man apprehends something of life and its purposes.
Behind " the set grey life and apathetic end," he has
discerned the flare of the fires of Prometheus. Beneath
the noise of the cities he can hear the pipe of Pan
among the reeds. In the midst of experience, set in
custom and routine, he can exalt the moments, rare and
imperishable, in which the " pent-up spirit " breaks
through into Eternity.

Mr. Nevinson is a child of Shrewsbury and Oxford, of
both of which he has written with that love for particular
places which is the essence of the spirit of patriotism.
He has lived in a block-dwelling; and from that life
came the writing of " Neighbours of Ours," the best
volume of tales which ever took as their theatre of

17 c

AFTER THE REACTION

action the desolate and fascinating region of the "East
End." The contrast between the Reaction and the
newer spirit is conspicuous in the comparison of Mr.
Nevinson's stories of the life of the poor with the
fruitful crop of pictures of slum life the mean street,
the Jago, " Badalia Herodsfoot " or " 'Liza of Lambeth "
which developed under the inspiration of that insistent
tyranny. The cleverness, the essential ignorance of
the journalist who prowls through the streets of poverty
as he would prowl through the interior of China seeking
copy; with the same eye for picturesque effect and
the same contempt for its peoples, splashing on the
canvas his hard yellows and purples is revealed in
its insolence by the work of one who has lived in sym-
pathy and comradeship with those who have failed.
Mr. Nevinson's stories notably the " St. George of
Eochester " and " Father Christmas " may be com-
mended to all who would understand the meaning of
tenderness and a man's compassion for the men and
women and children who are trampled under in the
modern struggle, the crowd whose acquiescence is more
tragical than its despair.

From the homes of poverty Mr. Nevinson passed into
the larger world ; to see cities and men ; and everywhere
the strong triumphant and the weak suffering. He was
present at the pitiful comedy of the thirty days' war in
Greece ; present also at the more pitiful tragedy of the
destruction of two free nations in South Africa amid
the heroism of the one side and the other. From these
and the lessons learnt in them, from the " things seen "
in the great moments of life and the quiet interludes
*' Between the Acts," he has collected those volumes
of impression and appeal which have revealed his power
in literature.

18

AFTER THE REACTION

Two elements mingle in all his work. The one is
pagan, the plea of Pan, the protest of the " Savage
Soul." It is life passion protesting against the cramp-
ing boundaries of convention and dead things. The
other is Pity, learnt by the older gods in the watching
of the human tragedy through so many hurrying cen-
turies ; pity for all who find themselves with the few
against the many, crushed by the clumsiness and violence
of the world. The one thing which appears to him
intolerable is the rotting at ease. The one tragedy is
the burning out of high emotion into a little heap of
ashes. " To grow fat and foul in clubs and country-
houses," is the nightmare of one of his characters, " till
I slime away in the funeral of an elderly country gentle-
man who had been in the army once." Against this
vision of the faint-hearted he exalts the company of the
warrior saints. "Life piled on life were all too little
for the unquenchable passion of my eyes." The praises
of a mechanical civilisation leave him cold. " To set
two bulging, flat-footed gentlemen," is his verdict, " to
stand on a flagstone instead of one, seems an unworthy
aim for Evolution after all its labours."

Pan is not dead. He but waits, a little contemptuous
of it all till the tyranny be overpast. Even in the
heart of tranquillity and rational order he can still be
found disguised : a wanderer : abiding his time and sure
of his ultimate triumph.

He appears in Greece, his old home, with all the
pageant of an unchallenged beauty, hill and heather,
and violet sea. He is found again by the ancient wall
across Britain marking the boundaries of another
Empire which once thought itself immortal. His
laughter startles the Cathedral close as he mocks the
anger of the Canon against his servant, Elizabeth, for

19

AFTER THE REACTION

her transgression with her soldier-lover. He is present
with the new knowledge of pity upon the war-scarred
slopes of Waggon Hill above Ladysmith in the clear
night after the storm of men and elements, watching
over the bodies of the dead.

The contrast between this vision on the hillside, the
mingled sorrow and rejoicing over the body of a dead
peasant, with any of Mr. Kipling's latest tales, " The
Captive," or, " Private Capper," will reveal the meaning
of a change. All the music-hall song and cleverness
have vanished from the horizon of this poor sightless
body. Not in this lies its greatness : but in that
Divine Fire which entered into the heart of him as he
moved through the slow routine of his toil, and drove
him out here from his dear home into the battle in
passionate response to the call of the Fatherland : and
has left him here at evening, with all the story told ;
the dust gathering on his lips, silent in the summer
rain.

The author will re-echo the protest of Pan against
the plaint of the priest at man's seeming wickedness.
Surveying the long course of history, he will testify
with something approaching awe to an endurance and
indomitable will which raises him above the level of the
older gods. There is a passage in this testimony not
unworthy to be placed with Lamennais's " Hymn of the
Dead," or Stevenson's awful vision in " Pulvis et
Umbra":

" They appear and are gone. Like shipwrecked boys
they are cast upon the shoals of time, and drop off into
darkness. No research of history, no deciphering of
village tombs can ever recover them. We think that
somewhere they may still lie nestled up, with all their
age about them ; but even darkness holds them no more,

20

AFTER THE REACTION

They stood on this flying earth, we see their footsteps,
we hear the thin ghost of their voices, and on the stones
lies the touch of their dead hands, but they are nowhere
to be found at all. They knew how short their dear life
was, yet they filled it with labour and unrecorded toil.
Morning and night, through their little space of minutes,
they struggled and agonised to keep on living and feed
their children for the struggle and agony of a few
minutes more. The sun blasted them, ice devoured
their flesh, their mouths were mad with thirst, hunger
twisted them with cramps, plague consumed them, they
rotted as they stood, bolts of torture drove through
their brains, their bodies were clamped into hoops ; in
battle, in child-bed they died with extremity of pain.
Yet they endured, and into the chinks and loopholes
of their misery they crammed laughter and beauty and
a passion transfiguring them beyond the semblance of
the gods."

'Tis a sombre picture ; yet not without its triumph.
" Let us leave it to the priests to marvel at men's
wickedness," he cries at the end. " Over any such
thing as love or laughter in the heart of man I could
stand astonished with admiration throughout the life-
time of a god."

The work of these writers is written, in Mr. Watson's
phrase, "in estrangement." Over all is the conscious-
ness of battle upon a losing side. They have kept the
faith in a dark hour when all the world seemed against
them. The tumult swept past them. They stood alone,
alien in spirit from the company : from the noisy rout,
which seemed the procession of an unending day. With
the visible passing of all this clamour has come the
growth of a newer spirit, with an ardour and buoyancy

21

AFTER THE REACTION

lacking in those who suffered from its domination.
Such is the spirit of those younger writers who first
have apprehended that the Reaction, instead of being
living and dominant, was become at heart dead and
sterile. Of such, two of the most vigorous to-day are
Mr. Hilaire Belloc and Mr. Gilbert Chesterton.

Mr. Belloc has produced work which is excellent
in itself and more excellent in its promise of better
things to come. He exhibits especially two qualities
always rare in English writing the quality of rhetoric
and the quality of irony. His earlier works, studies
of the Revolution, Danton and Robespierre, are full of
the triumph of human personality over the influences
of outward things. His work, like the architecture of
that Middle Age which he loves so ardently, reveals
the union of this spirit of romance with the spirit
of laughter. The high roofs and spires are mingled
with the gargoyles and grotesques, and all the humour
and aspiration which gave its life to the greatest
century which the world has ever seen. He will pass
from the record of romance to the roaring satire of
"Dr. Caliban," or collaboration with Mr. Chesterton
in the ridiculing of the Tariff Reform Commission.
High spirits and a kind of elemental energy are charac-
teristic of all his work. No present-day writing conveys
so much the impression of a huge enjoyment in its prepa-
ration. Much of Mr. Belloc' s humour is indeed recondite,
written to please himself and for the few who will under-
stand ; the decent citizen but becomes conscious that
some one is laughing at him as indignant he hurries by.

In " The Path to Rome," the most popular of all his
books, this vitality is everywhere present. Youth, its
sincerity, its self-sufficiency, its vigour and hope and
enormous dreams, is present in all this record of pil-

22

AFTER THE REACTION

grimage. As the traveller swings out from Toul in the
sunset by the Nancy gate and strikes in a bee-line
across the backbone of Europe to the goal of his
wandering, he pours out all his experience of outer and
inner things. He makes up songs, and sings them as
he journeys, in dispraise of heretics or praise of God.
He finds companionship in the common people, the
people of the road, the people of the villages, away
from the dust of the cities. He apprehends "the solid
form of Europe under him like a rock " ; unchanged
and permanent, beside which all the noise of progress
appears but vaporous and transitory.

In the story of "Emmanuel Bui-den," Mr. Belloc's
ironical method has attained its clearest expression.
The elaborate satire penetrates every page ; from the
pompous parody of the title, through the nonsense of
the preface, to the Burden genealogies designed in the
futile exactitude of the three-volume biography. To
nine out of ten, reading, as they think, a dull and
straightforward narrative, all this will appear very
tedious. But in the underlying spirit there is a
marked and momentous change from the spirit of the
social satire of fifteen years ago. The literature of
the Reaction found the subject of all its humours in the
middle-class tradesman. It was never tired of mocking
at his outlook, his contempt for art and literature and
all ideas, his confinement within the grooves of sectarian-
ism and the making of money. To these clever young
men Mr. Grundy, the husband of the dictator of the
suburbs, was the subject of an unfailing ridicule. They
pelted him with epigram. They caricatured his decen-
cies and devotions. They rolled the poor old gentleman
in the gutter and departed laughing hugely at their own
smartness and his bleats of indignation,

23

AFTER THE REACTION

With Mr. Belloc the process is reversed. Satire has
come over to the other side. Over against the new
wits, the cleverness engaged in the intervals of self-
indulgence in running (or ruining) an Empire ; with its
surface sparkle and its inner emptiness and frivolity,
Mr. Grundy with his tenacity, his simplicity, his austere
devotion to duty, appears as an entirely reputable figure.
Mr. Burden is Mr. Grundy, the "honest man and good
citizen," ironmonger of Thames Street. In his side
whiskers and frock-coat, as depicted by Mr. Chesterton,
with his impossible mid- Victorian residence at Avon-
more, Alexandrovna Road, Upper Norwood, with his
forty years' daily devotion to his trade, "his home,
manner and habit of life seemed to me who knew him
to be always England, England." " To see him open
his umbrella was to comprehend England from the
Reform Bill to Home Rule."

Against this old and passing England, the England
which had built up the great heritage of Empire, Mr.
Belloc exhibits the dismal crowd who have entered into
that goodwill and seems determined upon its destruc-
tion. Here are the children of the old, mocking at the
limitations of their fathers ; cosmopolitan financiers of
Semitic origin, exploiting, ostensibly, remote marshes,
in reality the British public, under the sonorous clap-
trap of "Empire Expansion"; broken down relics of
the feudal system compelled to re-establish their shat-
tered fortunes ; the new yellow journalism ; and the
rank and file of greedy persons of all classes who
rushed into the flotation, as clergymen and society ladies
and respectable country gentlemen rushed into the
gigantic gambling in South Africans which preceded
the Jameson Raid. These are the figures which fill
the foreground of the flotation of the M'Korio Delta

24

AFTER THE REACTION

Development Co. Experience of the bitter food of those
astonishing nineties in England, the Hooley scandals,
the Liberator, the Chartered Company, Whitaker Wright,
are woven into a satire in which the restraint of
the irony scarcely veils the passionate protest against
all this new corruption of a nation marching down
calamitous ways.

In such a morass of foulness Mr. Burden is engulfed.
He finds himself immediately in the toils, surrounded
by vague forces of evil. There is nothing definite.
The outline moves. As soon as he strikes out, the
walls, which seemed to be closing around him, part
aside and elude his blows. The business is of a kind
to which he is unaccustomed. The suavity and plausi-
bility of his confederates are equal to all his approaches.
There is a spirit in the air, in the public Press, around
the office of the company, a miasma which poisons the
blood and turns the balance of the brain. Although
the shares still stand high and there is outward pros-
perity, the conviction deepens that he is in the grasp of
unclean forces. He is troubled in the daytime with a
haunting sense of shame, at night by monstrous dreams.
The attempt of his colleagues to " freeze out " his
friend, Mr. Abbott (another absurd, early- Victorian
figure), who had refused to " come in," produces a
climax. The poor, bewildered mind breaks under the
strain. Mr. Burden, feeling actually in the presence
of a crowd, " the massed forces of this new world
surging against him," in one great scene of fury de-
nounces all his fellow-directors as rogues and thieves
and scum, and reels home to Upper Norwood to die.
The death scene is not inadequate to life's perpetual
irony. On the one hand is the outward, pitiful and
grotesque incident : a stout old man, muttering gibberish,

25

AFTER THE REACTION

being put to bed by the knife-boy and the cook. On the
other is the inward grandeur, Death and his armies and
majesty visibly present in this suburban villa, and
present also the three great Angels, " the Design and
the Justice and the Mercy of God."

The M'Korio flourishes. Mr. I. Z. Barnett, who is
chief promoter, becomes Lord Lambeth. The shares
rise. But away in a remote suburb they have buried
Emmanuel Burden, Merchant, of Thames Street and
Upper Norwood (for whom, one is relieved to hear, Mr.
Belloc "has no fears at the Judgment seat"); and
with him they have buried the older England.

This remarkable work in some sense gathers up all
the threads of remonstrance into one deliberate im-
peachment of the spirit of the Reaction ; the fine fruits
of that "Imperialism" which ran like a species of
fluid madness through the veins of England during the
late disastrous years. Memorable in itself, it is more
memorable as a kind of pioneer of the revolt which
is essaying a return to sanity, and the broken tradition
of reform.

The rise of Mr. Chesterton in the public estimate has
exhibited the most sudden growth of all recent repu-
tations. While still on the right side of thirty, he
leapt into a position of which older men might well
be envious. His early work, " Greybeards at Play,"
a volume of fantastic verse, " The Wild Knight,"
serious poetry of remarkable originality and power,
" The Defendant," a collection of paradoxical essays,
revealed only to the few the presence of a new
writer and a new method. His life of "Browning,"
however, both in its merit and its definite challenge,
evoked a universal testimony that here was something

26

AFTER THE REACTION

which, whether you liked it or not, was henceforth to be
reckoned with in literature. Since then have followed
" Twelve Types," and " Watts," and a novel, once
again of daring originality, " The Napoleon of Netting
Hill " a parable of the perpetual survival of the spirit
of patriotism, however mystical and irrational, against
all the forces of ridicule and common sense. The
output continues of an astonishing fertility in daily and
weekly and monthly magazines. It is these outpour-
ings of himself, stripped of all reticence, which have
earned for Mr. Chesterton the bulk of his fame. He
loves the very breath of controversy. Open any news-
paper interested in the things for which he cares : you
will have a good chance of finding Mr. Chesterton in the
midst of a lively argument against a host of opponents,
with a calm confidence in his Tightness, an unfailing
good temper, a boisterous delight in the shrewd blows
given and taken. You will find him simultaneously
protesting against Dr. Clifford conducting a campaign
against Romanism under the guise of an attack upon
the Education Acts ; explaining to Mr. Blatchford and
Mr. McCabe the impossibility of Agnosticism, and his
envy of their simple belief; or expounding to an
audience inarticulate with wrath the necessity of
desiring Russia's success in the war against Japan.

Beneath all there is no mere love of paradox or
intellectual agility, but a very definite philosophy of
life. As the attitude of Mr. Yeats was one of protest,
so that of Mr. Chesterton is one of acceptance. The
denial of life, the longing of a fatigued age for nothing-
ness and the great Void, is to him a fundamental atheism
and blasphemy. Not "where there is nothing," but
"where there is anything," there "is God." He is a
mystic and an optimist, entirely satisfied, as he swaggers

27

AFTER THE REACTION

down Fleet Street, that all things are very good. With
Whitman he can protest, " No array of terms can
express how much at peace I am about God." To
many this boisterous content appears as an offence
and irreverence. To such he appears of those who are
too readily at ease in Zion. To others this revolt from
the denials of life has come with something of the nature
of an inspiration.

He is all for acceptance of the things that are, and
the revelation through these of the things that endure.
In all experience the present becomes a transfigured
past ; to the few only, as to this writer, that transfigura-
tion has been immediately accomplished. He has no
controversy with the results of modern progress, the
city, in slum or suburb. As wild and flaming meanings
call to him from beneath that dull surface as any appeal
in ancient forest or the voices of the mountains and the
sea. The great city he finds as something " wild and
obvious." The "casual omnibus" wears "the primal
colours of a fairy ship." The lights in the dark " begin
to glow like innumerable goblin eyes." Bermondsey is
decked with fairy bubbles for gas-lamps and haunted
with Presences of good and evil. The door-knockers of
Clapham, as he gazes at them, writhe into strange shapes,
the fat, red, polished pillar-boxes shout their mystical
meaning to the skies. Hardly a hair's breadth below
the cellars of Kensington flare the ancient elemental
fires. He is intoxicated by the " towering and tropical
visions of things as they are," the " gigantic daisies, the
heaven -consuming dandelions, the great Odyssey of
strange-coloured oceans and strange-shaped trees, of
dust like the wreck of temples, and thistledown like the
ruin of stars." Day by day the seeing eye beholds God
renewing his ancient rapture. The wild Knight in his

28

AFTER THE REACTION

quest, hearing "the crumbling creeds, like cliffs washed
down by water, change and pass," finds " all these things
as nothing"; confident that the turn of the road will
reveal the goal of all his wandering.

11 So with the wan waste grasses on my spear,
I ride for ever seeking after God.
My hair grows whiter than my thistle plume,
And all my limbs are loose ; but in my eyes
The star of an unconquerable praise ;
For in my soul one hope for ever sings,
That at the next white corner of a road
My eyes may look on Him."

To one inspired by such visions all the spirit of the
Reaction is summed up in the tremendous picture of
Watts's " Mammon." The vision is not Mammon or
Commerce, but " something intangible behind," a ruling
element in modern life. Here is " the blind and asinine
appetite for mere power " ; symbolised in " the all-
destroying God and king adorned with the ears of an
ass, declaring that he was royal, imperial, irresistible,
and, when all is said, imbecile."

" This is something which in spirit and in essence I
have seen before," he proclaims, " something which in
spirit and in essence I have seen everywhere. That
bloated, unconscious face, so heavy, so violent, so wicked,
so innocent, have I not seen it at street corners, in
billiard rooms, in saloon bars, laying down the law
about Chartered shares, or gaping at jokes about
women ? Those huge and smashing limbs, so weighty,
so silly, so powerless, and yet so powerful, have I not
seen them in the pompous movements, the morbid
health of the prosperous in the great cities? The
hard, straight pillars of that throne, have I not seen

29

AFTER THE REACTION

them in the hard, straight, hideous tiers of modern
warehouses and factories? That tawny and sulky
smoke, have I not seen it going up to heaven from all
the cities of the coming world ? This is no trifling with
argosies and Greek drapery. This is commerce. This
is the home of the god himself. This is why men hate
him, and why men fear him, and why men endure him."
Let all who are satisfied with the courses of modern
England during the past decade consider if there be not
at the last some warning of judgment in this verdict
upon an evil thing.

What is there common, it may be asked, to these
different writers, what spirit which may form the key
to the movement of the immediate years to come ?
There is much evidently divergent ; a continuous transi-
tion indeed from the complete denials of Mr. Yeats to
the complete assertions of Mr. Chesterton. But in all
may be traced one element ; the assertion of a passionate
Nationalism against both the cosmopolitan ideals of the
Victorian period at its beginning and the Imperial ideals
at its close. In the vision of the earlier age all national
differences were to smooth themselves out by the advance
of knowledge and reasonableness. Common sense, com-
merce, a universal peace were to create a homogeneous
civilisation, secure in comfort and tranquillity and a
vague, undogmatic religion. In the preaching of this
ideal, undoubtedly some of its advocates came perilously
near the abnegation of any special national affection,
any particular pride in, or devotion to, their land ; and
gave a handle to the dreary chatter of a Press which
branded them as the friends of every country but their
own. Against this came the reaction. Imperialism
asserted, indeed, the devotion of the individual to his

30

AFTER THE REACTION

own land ; but crudely denied the right to others of a
similar affection. It was convinced in pathetically
sanguine fashion of the Divine mission of England to
elevate each separate and subject race to the level of
May fair or Brixton. So the Irish, the Dutch of South
Africa, the natives of India, or of Nyassa (" half devil
and half child ") for their own good were to be educated
out of their own ways into English ways. They would
be placed under the cold justice of the Imperial
rule. They would be taught to forget their own lan-
guage and deny their own religions and ancient pieties.
They would learn to ascend the steep path of labour and
virtue which would eventually turn them into some replica
of that finished product of the universe, the Imperial
Briton.

Such was the ideal at its best. At its worst it became
a crude assertion of dominance, with a contempt as much
for the old England which had not apprehended these
Imperial ideals as for the foreigner who still obstinately
resisted their sway.

Against both these movements is now being set a
Nationalism which, on the one hand, passionately
asserts a mystical and entire devotion to its own land ;
on the other, a respect for the devotion of others. It
brands the murder of a nation as a sin alike against
man and God. One catches a note even of laughter
in the defiant scorn with which the newer spirit
confronts those who identify their own calamitous
methods with the welfare of their country, and would
brand all others as traitors. It is in the name of
England, as Englishmen concerned primarily with the
honour of their own land, as those to whom the very
fields and flowers, and the breath of the particular soil
speaks with an unchanging appeal, that these writers

31

AFTER THE REACTION

fling back the charges of disloyalty, made by those who
have never been able to understand the meaning of the
mystery of Patriotism.

This is common to all. Mr. Yeats is at the heart of
that National revival in life and literature which, in the
past few years, has made Ireland, on the remote boun-
daries of Europe, the centre of one of the few living and
compelling movements of the age. All his devotion
gathers towards the preservation of this individual
spirit, the spirit " at the heart of the Celt in the
moments he has grown to love through years of per-
secution, when, cushioning himself about with dreams
and hearing fairy-songs in the twilight, he ponders on
the soul and on the dead."

Mr. Watson laughs openly at " that odious charge
of inconstancy to my beloved and worshipped mother-
land." " To one conscious of these noble origins,
conscious, too, of having loved his country with the
vigilant love that cannot brook a shadow upon her
honour, the charge of being against her because he
deplores her temporary attitude and action, brings a
kind of amazement that has in it something akin to
despair."

Mr. Nevinson has devoted his days to appeals for
the struggle of martyred nations to maintain their own
life, in Ireland, in Macedonia, in South Africa. But
all his affection centres upon the very soil of his own
homeland.

" The seas gulf and fall around her promontories," is
his testimony, " or lie brooding there in green and purple
lines. Her mountains are low, like blue waves they run
along the horizon, and the wind flows over them. It is
a country of deep pasture and quiet downs and earthy
fields, where the furrows run straight from hedge to

32

AFTER THE REACTION

hedge. There is moorland too, and lakes with wild
names, and every village is full of ancient story. The
houses are clustered round old castle walls, and across
the breezy distance of fen and common the grey cathe-
drals rise like ships in full sail."

Mr. Belloc is perhaps the most entirely Nationalist.
He is all for the smaller community against the larger.
He sings the praise of the South country whose " great
hills stand along the sea," and of the men of the South
country against the remoter regions of England. When
he drinks the home-brewed ale he drinks (in his own
absurd and happy phrase) " Nelson and all the Vic-
tories." He will even protest in great language
patriotism for a Europe encompassed with alien forces,
a world outside which can never understand devotions
beaten into her soil by the passion of a thousand
years ;

" She will certainly remain.

" Her component peoples have merged and have re-
merged. Her particular, famous cities have fallen down.
Her soldiers have believed the world to have lost all,
because a battle turned against them. Her best has at
times grown poor and her worst rich. Her colonies have
seemed dangerous for a moment from the insolence of
their power, and then again (for a moment) from the
contamination of their decline. She has suffered in-
vasion of every sort; the East has wounded her in
arms and corrupted her with ideas ; her vigorous blood
has healed the wounds at once, and her permanent
sanity has turned such corruptions into innocuous
follies. She will certainly remain."

And Mr. Chesterton has made himself the very
apostle of a new Nationalism which proclaims this
variegated development as an essential for the preser-

33 D

AFTER THE REACTION

ration of the sanity of the world. " There is a spirit
abroad among the nations of the earth," he cries,
" which drives men incessantly on to destroy what they
cannot understand, and to capture what they cannot
enjoy." This is the spirit which all these men find in
the faction which has been dominant in politics and
literature. Its final and desperate rally is now gather-
ing in the forces enlisting with Mr. Chamberlain, under
the appeal both to cupidity and Imperial dominance, in
a last effort to maintain a departing supremacy. And
this is the spirit against which the new movement has
declared uncompromising war.

If literature be any guide, therefore, one can prophesy
certain notes of the spirit of the coming time.

First, this spirit will be National ; with no appearance
of balanced affection and an equal approval and sympathy
for all men, a universal benevolence. It will proclaim
always a particular concern in the well-being of England
and the English people ; a pride in its ancient history,
its ancient traditions, the very language of its grey skies
and rocky shore.

Second, it will, I think, dissever itself entirely from
those former rallies of a national spirit which have
immediately identified a nation with a small and limited
class, throwing up boundaries round its privileges
against a hungry and raging crowd. There will be
none of the follies of the " young England," or attempts
to revive a feudalism which had vigour in its day, but
now has ceased to be. The assertion will be of a
spiritual democracy, with a claim for every Englishman
and woman and child to some share in the great in-
heritance which England has won.

And third, therefore, you will note a bedrock demand
34

AFTER THE REACTION

in the thrusting forward of those problems of social
discontent and social reform, which are destined
ultimately to brush aside the futilities of the present
party strife. Against those who protest their devotion
to their country, but who have done nothing to make
that country more desirable for the masses of its
millions, and more secure in the devotion of free and
satisfied peoples, will be set up a determination at all
costs and through all changes to create an England
more worthy of the land of our desire. The repatriation
of a rural population with free men strong in the tenacity
which only security and contact with the land can give,
the grappling with the problems of our restless cities,
the more even spread of the national wealth, the wider
distribution of the good things which have flowed so
plentifully into our store, the assertion of a minimum
standard of life for each citizen of such a land these
are the things which will become more and more
insistent through the spirit that is arising after the
Reaction.

No gleam of such radiant visions penetrates through
the dusty atmosphere of contemporary politics. The
observer, limited to so dreary an outlook, might well
claim exoneration for despair of his country. Govern-
ment and Parliament are to-day seen mouthing and
mumbling over dead things with a kind of pompous
futility which would be ridiculous if it were not so
entirely tragical.

Such verses as those of Shelley in 1819 seem alone
adequate to the present ; with their vision of a
"Senate" with "Time's worst statute unrepealed " ;
religion as " a closed book" ; " rulers who neither see
nor feel nor know."

But now, as then, there can be hope of the presence
35

AFTER THE REACTION

also within these graves of that "glorious Phantom'
which may "burst to illumine our tempestuous day."
And those who have been watching all the long night
for the signs of its passing can even now see the dark-
ness lightened with the coming of the dawn.

36

DE MORTUIS

" Jls out aussi passe sur cette terre, ils ont descendu lefleuve
du temps : on entendit leurs voix sur ses bords, et puis on
n'entendit plus rien. . . .

" 11 y en avail qui disaient : Qu'est-ce que cesflots qui now
emportent ? Y a-t-il quelque cnose apres ce voyage rapide ?
Nous ne le savons pas, nul ne le salt. Et comme Us disaient
cela, lea rives s'evanouissoient. . . .

" II y en avail aussi qui semblaient dans un recueillement
profond ecouter une parore secrete, et puis I'ceil fixe sur le
couchant, tout a coup ils chantaient une aurore invisible ct
un jour qui ne finit jamais. . . .

" Ou sont-ils ? Qui nous le dira? Heureux les morts qui
meurent dans le Seigneur."

LAMENNAIS.

WILLIAM EENE8T HENLEY

YOU can count on the fingers of one hand the original
and formative minds in English letters ; and there
is one fewer to-day than yesterday. The advent of
W. E. Henley marked the coming of a new spirit. His
career coincided with its riotous supremacy. It was
dead before he died. Its followers gathered round him
as disciples round a master. It found expression in the
short-lived journals which he edited so brilliantly. It
stamped its seal upon a whole generation of young
authors who became infected with its scorns and
its devotions, and spread its faith through the English-
speaking world. For the first time since the days of
" Young England," literature was whole-heartedly on
the side of the reaction. Barbarism and the joy of
existence was one side of it, with a craving for tlje
sharp and bitter rind of life. Imperialism and love of
adventure was another the assertion of the right of the
strong man to rule, to trample on the weak, to crush
under and destroy for his pleasure. These were com-
bined with the hunger for the raw and primitive and
elemental ; the sloughing off of an ancient civilisation,
the calling up of the beast and the savage to arise from
their long sleep. No body of blameless citizens ever
wallowed in blood so fearfully as Henley's young men.
No man ever hated any cause more untiringly than

39

DE MORTUIS

Henley hated all that is meant by modern Liberalism.
Democracy and the rule of the many ; the protection of
the weak against the strong and the poor against the
powerful ; the decencies and respectabilities of ordered
life; the sentiment which dislikes pain and shrinks
from the brutalities of war ; all attempts to find a
sanctity in the rights of the common people, the cry
of the oppressed these causes were involved in one
universal condemnation. It was a spirit and a cult not
without pose and affectation. But it was alive, fervent,
consuming while it lasted much dead refuse. We who
are emerging from its tyranny to the saner realities
need not grudge an acknowledgment of the strength
of the thundercloud and the fiery splendour of the
storm.

What a feast of good things was represented by the
old National Observer ! For a Saturday's sixpence one
could obtain the first work of a dozen original and
daring minds. There would be ferocious political
leaders, sarcastic, bitter, striking to kill. These might
be followed by a poem from an unknown author, just
becoming talked about, a Mr. Kudyard Kipling. For
"Middles" you might read one of that series of
"Modern Men," the most incisive and dramatic
character sketches in modern journalism ; or one of
Henley's appreciations, as whole-hearted as his hatreds ;
or Mr. Kenneth Graham's "Golden Age" tales; or
Mr. Marriott Watson's sketches (he has never done
better work) ; or, perhaps, the table-talk of Mr.
Street's inimitable "boy," or Mr. Harold Frederic's
Uncle. And in the reviews you would find something
equally unexpected, a distinctive note behind the
summary of contents, a sifting and judgment of
ephemeral literature by the light of the fixed stars of

40

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

criticism. Financially, it was a failure. The clever-
ness and originality were too naked and unashamed.
Men reeled back into the sobriety of The Spectator
and similar safe periodicals. But for the few of that
age who had received the great gift of youth all this
noise and sparkle and glitter represented an adventure
into fairyland.

And the man who was at the centre of it all, the
heart of this exuberant and boisterous activity, was the
man who has died after a life of pain. The figure sug-
gested was of a great laughing giant, full of the open air
and physical well-being and personal response to the
zest of the battle of existence. The reality was a
tortured body, the experience of enormous suifering, life
creeping ever on broken wing in a maimed and restless
discomfort. With his life-long friend, Stevenson, he
has gone down singing into the darkness. History will
see these two optimists always in a clear white light of
afternoon. While stout burgesses with ample means
wept or squeaked over the miseries of existence and
demonstrated their dolors to an admiring world, these
two great sufferers from their beds of pain were pro-
claiming the triumph of things. Coughing his life out
in his darkened room, Stevenson sang carols in praise
of God; so insistent that the innocent like Mr. Archer
could reproach him for his too complacent exulta-
tion, and praise of this " brave gymnasium." In hos-
pital, stricken by poverty and perpetual pain, with
nerves on the rack and the things he loved for ever
beyond his grasp, Henley responded with thanks for his
" unconquerable soul." Undoubtedly, when all transi-
tory disputes have vanished, the world will deem itself
the richer for so bracing an example.

More even than in most men of genius the child
41

DE MORTUIS

survived in Henley. As a child he was wayward,
capricious, vain; never reconciled to the limitations
of life ; difficult to satisfy. He had all the child's
passionate loves and hatreds, the sudden transitions of
temper, the almost fierce affection ; with the occasional
inexplicable impulses to injure those he loved. The
attack on Stevenson, which caused the scandal of a day,
was hut an example. It was one of the great friendships
of history with depth and intimacy not yet fully re-
vealed. The lines to Baxter "How good it sounds,
Lewis and you and I" the dedications of "A child
curious and innocent," and "Time and Change," the
collaborated plays, show one side ; the figure of Burly in
Stevenson's " Talk and Talkers," the unforgettable
tribute at the end of the Christmas Sermon, the other.
But he saw a lay figure set up for worship. He struck
fiercely and blindly : at the figure and his dead friend.
The world was scandalised and delighted. " Lewis "
would have understood.

It is for the child elements that he will stand in
literature. He possessed a child's quick apprehension
of the sensuous aspect of things the dying year and
the coming of spring, night and the sea in storm, and
all the magical world of out-of-doors. He loved with a
child's delight the pageantry of war, the sword's " high,
irresistible " song, the bright flash of steel, and the
tramp of armed men. He had a childlike, unreserved
love of England, expressing in a few magnificent
ballads the mystery and sacredness of a Patriotism
rare in these latter days. And in the most appealing
and universal of all his poems, it is the child shrinking
from the Unknown and the Future : the child that has
suffered so much wistfully asking the meaning of it all :
the simple, pitiful note of fear and surprise at

42

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

"The terror of Time and Change and Death
That wastes the floating, transitory world."

There is little spontaneity in these songs. The
experiments in rhymeless metre are not altogether
successful. Even in the voice of triumph and exulta-
tion there is always the background of douht and
menace. The chill of the coming cold is in the songs
of Summer: "in the sun, among the leaves, upon the
flowers," creeps the shadow of the approach of Death.
For all the indomitable spirit, the proclamation that life
is worth living, and the refusal to whine and whimper,
it is the sombre side of life which Henley paints in his
poems. The Hospital Rhymes are mere jagged cries of
agony. " Into the night go one and all," " fatuous,
ineffectual yesterdays," " the menace of the irreclaim-
able sea " of such stuff are his verses woven. Perhaps
they will be remembered in the future more for their
occasional magnificence of phrase than for any natural
inevitableness and charm. " The past's enormous
disarray"; "the unanswering generations of the
dead"; "the immortal, inommunicable dream";
"the high austere, unpitying grave"; "night with
her train of stars, And her great gift of sleep " these
are as elemental and memorable as the great summaries
of Whitman. His is the poetry read by poets, the
quarry from which others will mine the marble and
fashion it into a thing of beauty.

As a great spirit unbreakable by time and fate,
Henley will go down to the future. To this man were
given many of the world's good things, varied interests,
a power of passionate appreciation of the best in
literature and common life, high and generous friend-
ships, love which was the inspiration of all the most

43

DE MORTUIS

triumphant of his songs. To him also were given
failure and pain : a perpetual ill-success in every enter-
prise : such suffering of body and spirit as seemed to
make him the sport of mischievous powers. All his
literary schemes collapsed : he lacked money and the
little satisfactions of a sheltered and tranquil existence.
The craving for a life of action perpetually fretted him,
the " home sickness " of " those detained at home un-
willingly." He had one child whom he adored. She
was torn from him ; and in one poem which sounds the
uttermost depth of tears he pictures " the little exquisite
Ghost " calling back across the grave to her Father and
Mother in those home kingdoms left desolate by Death.
Sometimes he was irritable and indignant, and struck at
the friends who loved him. But for the most part there
was a resignation, a determination to make the best of
things, a resolute refusal to give up and acknowledge
the triumph of the powers of darkness, which lifts the
whole tragic record out of the region of sorrow, and
transfigures it with a kind of glory.

"So be my passing!

My task accomplished and the long day done,
My wages taken, and in my heart
Some late lark singing.
Let me be gathered to the quiet west,
The sundown splendid and serene,
Death."

The spirit of one of the most appealing of his earliei
poems is the spirit in which most who knew and loved
him will wish to bid him farewell.

44

J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE

TWO writers are most responsible for whatever
popular success has been attained by the move-
ment termed a little grandiloquently "the Anglo-
Catholic revival in England." The one, Christina
Kossetti, wrote a few poems ; the other, J. Henry
Shorthouse, one novel. A woman and a layman of
the middle classes thus strangely provided the par-
ticular atmosphere of mysticism and aspiration which
softened the often hard, dogmatic teaching and the
fantastic ritual of the younger clergy. The enormous
popularity of " John Inglesant," described upon its first
appearance as " having taken the world by storm " and
enduring until to-day, is a little difficult fully to explain.
It is written in a rare and delicate prose, revealing a
rare and refined personality ; but this, if anything,
would militate against a wide acceptance. It advertises
itself as a " Romance," but readers anticipating
"Tushery" of the familiar type are dismayed by an
immediate plunge into Platonic discussions upon the
nature of the soul. It possesses little sense of unity,
and violates every law that should govern the successful
novel. Yet it has never ceased to attract a varied array
of champions. Its reception, indeed, is largely a matter
of temperament. Mr. Birrell, with all his eclectic taste,
has confessed that he cannot away with it. And many

45

DE MORTUIS

others less candid have probably in silence endorsed this
condemnation.

The secret of this acceptance lies, I think, in an
appeal to a type, widely spread, desirous of accepting a
certain view of life. The world of Shorthouse in
all his novels is a world viewed under a particular
aspect. Existence is pictured as a perplexing and
disturbed dream. Guidance is doubtful. The good
is often at cross purposes with the good. Human
life assumes the aspect now of a brilliant phantasia,
now of a masquerade. The later renaissance in
Italy, as shown in these pages, is progressing in an
intoxicating atmosphere and under a vague sense of
oppression. Men and women move through an en-
chanted landscape charged with emotion. It is a vision
above all of sudden transitions, of the irony of Change
and Death everywhere crashing in upon the players.
The transition is immediate from masques and revelry
and unbridled license to the "Memento, homo, quia
pulvis es," in which the lights suddenly wax dim and
all the music changes into terror and tears. Through
this strange pageant the strange pageant of life in
all time viewed from the towers of Eternity John
Inglesant " walked often as in a dream."

But the appeal which caught the imagination of men
living in an equally perplexing age rests in the conviction
of the author that there is a clue to the mystery. As
was said of Dante, "he believed, and in spite of all
affirmed the high harmony of the world."

This he was enabled to do by his spiritual interpreta-
tion both of the inward voice and the outward pageant
of things. In the latter he definitely accepted the
sacramental view of Nature. We are back in the
Middle Age. "All redness becomes blood, all water

46

J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE

tears." The natural is but the thin veil of the super-
natural, for ever almost bursting through. God is
visibly acting in His world ; the most trivial events are
charged with a spiritual significance. Other Presences
are watching the little decisions of the little life of
man. This view tolerates immediately, and without
any sense of disturbance, the incursions into the
story of mystery and miracle, the appearance of
the ghost of Strafford, or the crystal vision of the
death of Eustace. It is an attitude towards things
which finds a satisfaction in the dramatic symbolism
of an external ceremony, in music and light and ritual,
which to the ordinary man may be but irritating.
Others have shared the discovery of John Inglesant,
in that most touching description of his visit to little
Gidding, that "the gracious figure over the altar and
the bowed and kneeling figures," are essentially con-
gruous with "the misty autumn sunlight and the
driving autumn rain."

And the other clue to life's mazes Mr. Shorthouse
found in that doctrine of the Inner Light which he
received with his Quaker upbringing, and unfolded with
so winning an appeal. The Platonic doctrine of the
Divine guidance, of the direct call of God within the
soul of man, is the belief which leads John Inglesant
through the confused and troublous life of the seven-
teenth century. It is heard in the three great crises of
the book, to which all the lesser events lead, but which,
when they come, come suddenly. The first is the temp-
tation of the world, when De Cressy, the Benedictine, at
Paris, offers him the more excellent way. The second
is the temptation of the flesh, in the damp mists and
breathless air in the flight with Laurette from Florence
to Pistoia. The third is the temptation of the devil, in

47

DE MORTUIS

that most wonderful scene in the mountains of Umbria,
when John Inglesant lays his sword on the altar of
the little hillside chapel, and delivers his brother's
murderer to the judgment of God. Through these and
all other incidents of this play of tired children, amid
the troublous clash of war, in strange ways, with love
and loss, to the final serene sadness of old age, he has
ever the apprehension of this unseen hand. The pro-
mise was to his eager boyhood. " I think you may find
this doctrine," said his teacher, " a light which will
guide your feet in dark places ; and it would seem that
this habit of mind is very likely to lead to the blessed-
ness of the beatific vision of God." That promise
survived through all the vanity and terror of existence
tost amid the whirlpools of divergent spiritual tides.
And after it is all over he can assert with the confidence
of a direct experience that "we may not only know the
truth, but we may live even in this life in the very
household and courts of God."

Shorthouse only wrote one book. For twenty years
he put into these pages all his philosophy of existence.
He had said his say, and there was nothing more to be
said. Like Olive Schreiner, an author with whom,
despite superficial incongruities, he has much in com-
mon, he revealed his heart's secret in one supreme
emotional utterance. Pressed by his friends, he did
indeed essay further efforts. In the tranquil life of the
little German Court of the eighteenth century, he could
almost retain the atmosphere of large issues and spiritual
meanings, and in consequence the story of little Mark
nearly approaches success. But in the comfortable exis-
tence of nineteenth-century England, grave and sane
and without fear, in the life of the ordered city concerned
with sanitation and the Poor Law, the particular

48

J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE

spiritual ardour which he loved to portray appears
forced and artificial. So Lady Falaise failed, and Sir
Percival, his hero warrior, modelled after Gordon's
pattern, whose actual description perhaps almost
justified Barry Pain's cruel parody of the conversation
under the Tulip Tree. The writer who has most nearly
approached the spirit and success of Shorthouse's hero
in the modern world is John Oliver Hobbes in her
" Eobert Orange." The record of the fashioning in
Vanity Fair through great bitterness in the School for
Saints of a "Weapon keen and pliant to the will of God,
is a record of one moving amongst the phantom society
of the nineteenth century, as Inglesant moved through
the phantom courts of Italy three hundred years ago.
But the book most revealing the same inner spirit, with
something of the delicacy and charm of style, is the
" Road Mender," the work of an author also indebted
to a Quaker upbringing for keen insight into the things
of the spirit, and a capacity for the estimating, at true
value, of the Temporal and the Eternal.

The style of Shorthouse at its best stands almost
without rival in the literature of the past twenty years
for a particular refinement and delicacy. The inevitable
comparison is with Newman : not that " John Inglesant "
achieves even a momentary rivalry with that supreme
perfection of English prose, but that in each case there
is an altogether personal secret and appeal which defies
analysis. Passage after passage reads like music.
Who is ever likely to forget the concluding scene of
this great spiritual record : the sunset over the city :
and after the storm, in the quiet air of England, far
from the confused and passionate life of Italy, John
Inglesant's farewell?

" We are like children, or men in a tennis-court, and
49 E

DE MORTUIS

before our conquest is half won the dim twilight comes
and stops the game ; nevertheless, let us keep our
places, and, above all things, hold fast by the law of
life we feel within. Let us follow in His steps, and
we shall attain to the ideal life ; and, without waiting
for our ' mortal passage,' tread the free and spacious
streets of that Jerusalem which is above.

" He spoke more to himself than to me. The sun,
which was just setting behind the distant hills, shone
with dazzling splendour for a moment upon the towers
and spires of the city across the placid water. Behind
this fair vision were dark rain-clouds, before which
gloomy background it stood in fairy radiance and light.
For a moment it seemed a glorious city, bathed in life
and hope, full of happy people who thronged its streets
and bridge, and the margin of its gentle stream. But
it was ' breve gaudium.' Then the sunset faded, and
the ethereal vision vanished and the landscape lay dark
and chill.

" ' The sun is set,' Mr. Inglesant said cheerfully,
' but it will rise again. Let us go home.' '

Only to those secure in such a serenity, amid all the
terror of passing things, can come, in the splendour of
sunset, so tranquil an acceptance of the ending of
the day.

50

HENRY SIDGWICK

" r I iHE year 1851," was said when Turner died,
JL " will in the future be remembered less for
what it has displayed than for what it has withdrawn."
The same prophecy may surely be made of the year
which took from us, scarcely noticed amid the clamour
of disastrous war, John Kuskin and Henry Sidgwick.
Each was in many respects typical of the University
he served so well. Ruskin was a child of Oxford.
Eloquent, famous, dogmatic, no worshipper of con-
sistency, he lived before the world, taking all men into
the confidence of his changing opinion. Sidgwick,
retired, restrained, almost unknown to the crowd,
advanced with cautious steps, weighing each sentence
before giving it utterance, putting his life-force into
work for his University. The one attracted crowded
audiences to his lectures, which were subsequently read
wherever +he English language was spoken. The other
at Cambridge addressed twelve or twenty students, and
only appealed in his writings to a few serious minds.
The death of the one, even in the most perilous period
of the war, was marked by the lamentation of the multi-
tude. The death of the other passed almost unnoticed
by the Press and the busy world. Future ages, I think,
will find a difficulty in deciding to which of these
two thinkers the world owes the profounder debt of
gratitude.

51

DE MORTUIS

Clarity of thought and unwavering fairness towards
opponents are characteristic of Sidgwick's philosophical
writings. Only once did he appear to approach the
limits of legitimate criticism : in his half-contemptuous
dismissal of Herbert Spencer's philosophy as a serious
advance in the progress of thought. For the rest his
expositions of other men's systems were astonishingly
clear and generous. He sometimes humorously com-
plained that he had never been able to found a school
at Cambridge : that no body of students acknowledged
him as their master. How could he found a school of
followers, who so temptingly placed before us the claims
of so many different philosophies : who would expound
another's creed with the same enthusiasm as his own ?
The school he founded was a school of those who
attained divergent positions, but who all acknowledged
the lessons learnt from him: fairness to opponents,
ardent search for enlightenment, devotion to truth
wherever it might lead them.

He had resigned his fellowship in early life as incom-
patible with his beliefs. He never faltered in his con-
viction of the impossibility of the old tests and articles.
Yet all must have noted in his controversy with Dr.
Rashdall on the limits of religious conformity, how
anxious he was not to draw these limits tightly round
others. He would allow for all possibilities before
branding any fellow-man as guilty of the moral laxity
which with him always ranked amongst the deadly sins.
And yet with all this was no mistiness, no vagueness
in which all distinction vanishes. The limit may be
made as comprehensive as possible. But it is drawn at
the last with no faltering hand. Beyond this line, as he
can see it, there is a region to which no man may go
without peril to his soul.

52

HENRY SIDGWICK

His " Ethics " is his greatest work. As a moralist
he will first be remembered. They are right who say
that he possessed a mind essentially analytical. They
are wrong who assert that he confined himself to criti-
cism and presented no constructive system. He broke up
the old Utilitarianism, with its illogical confusion of the
claims of self and others. He attempted to resolve all
the social duties into the primary virtue of benevolence.
And he acknowledged that the impulse to seek the
happiness of others owns its origin to an intuition which
no purely human outlook can justify or explain. So in
his famous concluding chapter he protested the insuf-
ficiency of all the popular naturalistic systems, and the
inadequacy of the moral sanction without the postulates
of God and Immortality.

His work was greater than his writing. The
University of Cambridge in its present constitution is
largely his creation. For twenty years he was the
acknowledged leader of the party of reform which
effected the transition from the old age to the new.
All through the struggle he was working for the expan-
sion of the University beyond its ancient limitations,
for the increasing of its capacity of national service.
In the efforts for the abolition of sinecures, the abandon-
ment of theological tests, the growth of the University
beyond the limits of the Colleges, above all in the
opening of its teaching to women students, he played
a prominent part. He lived to see the quiet induc-
tion of changes which a former time would have con-
templated with forebodings of ruin. Only at the close of
his long term of service was the outlook clouded by the
reaction inevitable after far-reaching reform. During
his later years there came the triumph of a conserva-
tism once impotent. All the special movements he had

53

DE MORTUIS

advanced were suddenly checked in their progress.
The recognition of external students was refused by
the rejection of their appeal for the diploma. The
struggle for religious liberty was checked by the refusal
to sanction St. Edmund's Hostel for Roman Catholic
students. Above all, the long effort for the education of
women was disastrously closed by the defeat of the
appeal for the titular degree. He could not be indif-
ferent to this change in the University he loved so well.
He recognised the inevitable, resigned his position on the
Council, and withdrew himself from the arena of conflict.
Here was no feeling of pique or transitory despondence.
But he acknowledged that his own work was done ; that
the future belonged to a newer generation, inspired by
different ideals.

So he noted a similar change in the wider questions
of his time. He had thrown himself with ardour into
the struggle for religious liberty which ennobled the
middle years of the century. " Absorbed," he described
the company to which he belonged, " in struggling for
freedom of thought in the trammels of an historical
religion." He had lived to see the triumph of his
cause. Now a new age had dawned and new dangers
threatened the health of society. He turned to confront
the problems of the newer time. " Freedom is won,"
he said, "and what does Freedom bring us to? It
brings us face to face with atheistic science : the faith
in God and Immortality, which we had been struggling
to clear from superstition, suddenly seems to be in tJie
air : and in seeking for a firm basis for the fight we find
ourselves in the midst of the ' fight with death.' '

The Metaphysical Society of which he had been a
member had represented the older struggle : the conflict
of widely disordered faiths and denials. It had seen

54

HENRY SIDGWICK

the triumph of its aims the practical toleration of all
forms of belief and negation. Now the time for re-
construction had come the survivors should gather
together after the great conflict. So the newer Syn-
thetic Society was formed : endeavouring to unite all
those to whom the word "God" bore some intelligible
meaning. He himself had laid down the first principles
of union in his admirable clear essays. And in all the
further work of reconstruction it is difficult to over-esti-
mate the loss of his penetrating criticism, unflinching
expression of truth, and eager search for faith adequate
to save mankind from advancing indifference and
decay.

His active work for the Psychical Research Society
was but an application of the principle which guided
all his progress. Here was no credulous search
after a spirit of divination, or hunger for marvels
in an age staled by custom. But he was ever the
seeker for all knowledge which could throw light upon
the things of life. He advanced as readily along
new and unpopular paths as on the beaten tracks of
progress. He ever waged unceasing war against the
spirit of condemnation without judgment, of rejection
of evidence because undesired, whether manifested in
the older theology or the newer sciences. So he gave
his great name and critical powers to the study of the
mysterious phenomena of the border world. He was
once the dupe of clever schemers, and often the subject
of the mockery of the Press. But he continued to
support the work until the end. The evidence con-
vinced him of the presence of dim, undefined forces,
of something operating in the world of human con-
sciousness which the ordinary man had failed to
recognise and science had hitherto ignored : and he

55

was determined in the necessity for the continuance
of the study and the wresting of the control of obscure
mental phenomena from the hands of the quack and the
charlatan. But it failed to yield him, as it seemed to
yield to some, clear and indubitable proof of the life
beyond death. Neither here nor in any past time could
he find satisfactory evidence of the penetration of the
inscrutable secret of the grave.

The philosophical proofs of Theism he was unable
to accept as satisfactory. " The more sceptical atti-
tude," he said, " has remained mine through life."
But he was convinced that belief in God and in Im-
mortality are vital to human well-being. " Humanity"
this was his unshakable conviction " humanity
will not and cannot acquiesce in a godless world."
He was eager to recognise the complete relativity
of our knowledge: the vast sea of ignorance that
surrounds us. One of his favourite theses rested on the
possibility of another great religious inspiration. He
could hope for the return of a period of unclouded
faith after the age of disintegration had passed away.
He re-echoes the famous lines of his friend, which he
says he " could never read without tears " : the pro-
test of the heart against the " freezing reason " and the
sound of "an ever-breaking shore that tumbles in the
godless deep ": the spirit that feels as " a child that
cries but crying knows his Father near." Wir heissen
euch hoffen the sad yet not entirely mournful refuge of
so many of the great men of his time was his final
message. " The revealing visions come and go : when
they come we feel that we know : but in the intervals
we must pass through states in which all is dark, and
in which we can only struggle to hold the conviction
that

56

HENRY SIDGWICK

" Power is with us in the night
Which made the darkness and the light
And dwells not in the light alone."

Beyond the work, greater far than the creed, was
the personality of the teacher we knew and loved.
To the younger of us at Cambridge, seeing in him
a figure who had " drunk delight of battle with his
peers " in the controversies of the age, he seemed
indeed the " Man of Wisdom " of the Greek dreamer ;
the philosopher whom the people, were they not blind,
would drag forth and crown king. To us he stood for
" philosophy " at its highest. Here was the spirit
which showed the power of the student of all time
and all existence. We noted in him the capacity for
weighing evidence, the detached judgment, the multi-
farious interests in all the thought and progress of the
world. His lectures were attended by a scanty few.
Men complained that they were of little utility for the
schools. In metaphysic he would spend the course of
a term in defining the words used and laying down
the first principles. The more impatient fled away.
In ethic he would trace the course of his own
spiritual development : from the Utilitarianism of Mill
through the influence of Butler: a progress always
directed to one end through the troubled waters of
controversy. To those pursuing a difficult voyage
through the same unquiet sea, the lectures proved
unique and fascinating. When we came to know
him personally, our respect and admiration deepened.
His hospitality at Newnham was long to be remem-
bered. Without the asceticism he repudiated or the
luxury he deplored in the newer generation, he proved
a host to whom we would readily have given all our
evenings. He was a brilliant talker, and we would

57

DE MORTUIS

gladly have listened to him in silence. This he would
never allow. He would draw out the retiring, tolerate
the absurd, welcome even the dull and commonplace.
Our most fatuous remarks would be accepted and
discussed. We left feeling that we were worth
more than we had thought before : humbled indeed
by comparison with an almost impossible standard of
attainment: but saved from utter self-distrust by the
recognition that even to the mediocre and ignorant
there was the possibility of an occasional inspiration.

Nor will his assistance be forgotten in deeper matters.
More and more his advice was sought on questions of
perplexity and honour. It came to be accepted that
any course meeting with the approval of his high ideal
of life could be pursued with clear conscience. Those
alone who were accustomed to turn to him in the
difficult problems of practical life could adequately
understand the dreary, almost incredible blank created
by the knowledge of his death.

The end was worthy of the life. A paper read before
the Synthetic Society marked the beginning of the end.
" Everybody was struck by the power of the paper,"
wrote one who was present, "but they were even more
impressed by the animation and brilliance with which
the reader took part in the subsequent debate. A few
days later his hearers learnt that their guest had gone
through the evening with the prospect of almost immi-
nent death before him." The command had suddenly
come to set his house in order. He prepared for death
by a rapid and terrible disease as one going on a
journey. One after the other he detached himself from
the multifarious accumulated interests of a busy life.
He resigned the professorship to which he had added
such distinction, only anxious that the work should be

58

HENRY SIDGWICK

carried forward by the most competent hands. He
enforced secrecy as to the nature of his illness. He
would leave the place in which he had played so high a
part without any needless demonstration of ceremony or
of pity. He set himself in the last few months of
suffering, with no complaining against the inscrutable
decree, to await the end : still willing, as far as in him
lay, to perform the duties of life, still interested in the
activities of the scene he was so soon to leave for ever.
Although all knew the end was inevitable and the most
speedy was the most kindly, the news came with no
ordinary wonder that Henry Sidgwick had joined the
" unanswering generations of the dead." His writing
represents the philosophy of a transitional time, and may
not be destined long to endure. His reputation, always
confined to the few, will soon vanish from the memory
of man. But the character which shone so brightly
through those closing scenes, greater far than his
thought or his work, cannot but survive the inexorable
years. Wir heissen euch lioffen. We bid you to hope.
Is there anything more to say ?

59

FREDERIC MYERS

O WARDS the end of Myers's life, inspired by
_ that shining energy which only seemed to
increase as the sun dropped to the horizon, the
Psychical Research Society initiated an inquiry into
the attitude of modern man towards the promise
of immortal life. The investigation was, I believe,
abandoned in England, where reticence still forbids
an eager sincerity about ultimate questions. But it
flourished mightily in America, where a new child race
will discuss its own spiritual anatomy with all the
candour of interested children. I am not sure if the
complete results have ever been published. I know some
of the replies to the printed questions were of extra-
ordinary interest. The inquiry was of belief in
immortality and of hope for immortality. The main
revelation was of the latter. The attestation of man's
belief is irrelevant. Few know what they believe at all.
Belief changes from day to day, and in various atmo-
spheres, like a guttering flame. Belief over the breakfast-
table is something different from belief in time of the
soul's upheaval, or confronting the piteous silence of the
dead. And in any case belief or disbelief in life beyond
the grave can have no effect upon that life's reality or
illusion. But hope is more vital. A man is more at
home with his desires. And the hope itself may be a

60

FREDERIC MYERS

factor in that hope's fruition ; in a universe where, as
a matter of experience, each hungry soul receives its
heart's desire; life more and fuller for those who
demand it, for those who demand it also the sleep of an
eternal night.

The answers exhibited a large and sincere body of
opinion joyfully accepting this second alternative. The
note of some was contentment with life well spent,
slowly rounding off the long day's work into the tran-
quillity of evening. The cry of others was the old cry of
startled fear at the unknown. " In that sleep of death
what dreams may come " seems to become a question
even more haunting with the advance of the years. They
feared to take the chance. Visions of a future menace
have been intensified by the spectral discoveries of the
sciences. The rolling up of the curtain of space and
time has revealed a boundless universe of night and
terrors, flaring fires of sun and star, an abyss without
purpose or plan. The perplexity of Tennyson in old age
before the vision of Vastness, the pathetic cry of Spencer
as he confronts an unintelligible evolution and dissolu-
tion with, beyond, an emptiness or reality all unknown,
has bitten deep into the minds of the more serious men
of the age.

But with most the desire for an end was built neither
upon contentment with the present nor fear of an incal-
culable future. The proclamation of life-weariness was
the dominant assertion. The shrinking was not from
life's suffering and confusion, but from life itself. The
assertion has come from a civilisation tired alike of so
much and so little that the effort of hope and change
is itself an evil ; in a universe the fit consummation of
whose courses will be rest and quietness.

Against such acquiescence all the life of this man
61

was one passionate protest. He was filled with a fury
of aspiration similar to that of Tennyson after life's
unending day. Better life in all the circles of the
mediaeval inferno, both of these life-worshippers as-
serted, than life vanishing like the vapour or the
candle-flame when the tale is told. The triumph of
death was the one unendurable consummation. The
acceptance of such a belief, while it lasted, in his
own experience emptied the zest from human action,
stole all the colours from the flowers. Life under
such a domination of greyness became a mere gnawing
of dead bones, a mumbling in the darkness ; told by
an idiot ; signifying nothing. Myers refused to accept
such a negation until some voice which rendered doubt
impossible proclaimed the death of man, and no hope in
dust. In the midst of an age and civilisation stamped
with life-weariness, literature everywhere finding a
sombre satisfaction in the end of it all, he appears as
a figure from another, more ardent, age. He belongs in
spirit to that earlier time when life piled on life appeared
all too little for the hungry heart of man ; or to the
new outburst of human energies in the birth of modern
days, when man flung himself with a kind of heroic fury
upon the boundaries of his tiny world.

It is in this nursing of the unconquerable hope through
an age too much inclined to abandon the quest in despair,
that Myers remained as a figure of unfading interest ; far
more than in any definite discovery which he thought
himself to have made of that hope's vindication. Given
life, he was entirely content with anything that life
might bring. He never had any fear of the possibilities
of evil dreams. He demanded no paradise of jewels and
gold. He feared no clumsy or malignant forces. He
asked merely " the glory of going on and still to be."

62

FREDERIC MYERS

His attitude to the last was one of a large curiosity ;
" a little disappointed," he once wrote to me after
illness, at not " passing over." It was a re-echo of
Kingsley's " Beautiful, kind Death, when will you come
and tell me what I want to know?" Something was
there of Whitman's brave spirit as the shadow crept
ever nearer over the hills

" The untold want by life and land ne'er granted \
Now voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find."

The fragment of autobiography, published after his
death, so perfect in form, so resonant, to those of us
privileged to know its author, of that triumph of certainty
which filled all its later years, so tantalisingly brief and
broken to some who knew how much he had to say of
life's spiritual voyages, exhibited in every line this con-
cern in the one absorbing question. Early religion
which never gripped the heart yielded immediately to
the fascinations of the Hellenic ideal. It was a species
of intoxication ; fostering evil as well as good ; aiding
in his own words " imaginative impulse and detachment
from sordid interests " ; but providing " no check for
pride." It rose in a night as a revelation of a world of
unfading beauty. It fell in a day with the realisation that
nothing remained of it all but ruins and a dream. In a
vision, gazing from the summit of Syra on Delos and the
Cyclades, and those straits and channels of purple sea,
he apprehended that all this was dead and gone for ever.
And he turned, " with a passion of regret," from a world
which suddenly had crumbled to a little dust.

Afterwards, through the influence of Josephine Butler,
"Christian conversation came in a potent form." He
was introduced by an inner door, " not to its encum-

63

DE MORTUIS

bering forms and dogmas, but to its heart of fire."

That " heart of fire " breathes through every line of

" St. Paul," the one great Evangelical poem of the
century :

" Yea through life, death, thro' sorrow and thro' sinning

He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed ;
Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,
Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ."

Alas! the vision faded, and the ardour. "I, even I,"
at first he could write to a friend, "wretched and half-
hearted beginner as I am, can almost say already that I
know the thing is true." " Gradual disillusion " came
from increased knowledge of history and of science, from
wider outlook on the world. That Christ, as in the
vision of a whole age, now appeared as "dead in that
lone Syrian town." The manger is found, filled with
mouldy hay ; the rain pours through the broken roof ;
the wind moans outside unheeded :

" The ancient stars are tired and dim,
And no new star announces Him."

" Insensibly the celestial vision faded " ; and " left
me to ' pale despair and cold tranquillity.' '

" It was the hope of the whole world that was
vanishing," he wrote, "not more alone." The effect
of agnosticism upon him was wholly evil. " During
this phase only can I remember anything of dreariness
and bitterness of scorn of human life, of anger at
destiny, of deliberate preference of the pleasures of the
passing hour."

An entry in the diary, " H.S. on Ghosts," marked the
first line of light on the horizon. The thought came
to him of turning the weapons of negation against itself
and utilising in the work of rebuilding the very forces

64

FREDERIC MYERS

which had destroyed the cloud-capped palaces. Lifers
continuance should no longer be guaranteed by dreams
and visions, wild, unsupported hopes, a priori philosophy,
or the shadowy remembrance of things belonging to an
ever remoter past. But the evidence of the empirical
method itself, the severest tests which reason could
desire of manifestations now actually in the world,
should certify existence beyond the grave. Science
should itself rebuild what science had destroyed.

Varied motives drew first together that little band of
adventurers who were prepared to explore and to occupy
regions of experience, avoided by the common man as
poisonous and unclean. With some it was the demand
for rescue of such mysterious kingdoms from the
dominion of the criminal and the charlatan. With
others it was the conviction, an inheritance from the
ardour of the Renaissance, that no element in this
unintelligible world should be ruled out of investigation.
With a third was a faint, if never entirely articulate,
hope that here might be given the very key of the
unopened door, which every generation of man had
sought to find in vain. Myers, then, as in all his days,
made no secret of his motive. It was less to investigate
dispassionately with a scientific detachment than with a
kind of furious determination to tear from Nature herself
the secret she had hidden for so long that he undertook
this exploration of the rubbish-heaps of life. He con-
fesses his first reluctance to " re-entering by the scullery
window the heavenly mansion out of which I had been
kicked by the back door." But he wrestled with this
mysterious spirit behind the world's outward show, as
Jacob wrestled with his mysterious visitant till the break-
ing of the day. " ' I will not let thee go until thou
bless me ' so cried I in spirit to that unanswering shade."

65 F

DE MORTUIS

In that heroic struggle he consumed the remainder
of his days. From near the beginning he held himself
to have obtained the evidence he desired. That hope
sustained him to the end. The results can be studied
in innumerable green volumes, The Transactions of the
"Psychical Research Society," and in the great work
issued after his death, in which he sets out at length the
evidence and the theories he had built upon it. It was
not an opinion, but a conviction. It transfigured all his
later life. I had the privilege of working some slight
degree with him in the last years. I shall never forget
the eagerness with which he essayed the work of in-
vestigation, the welcome to all obscure and remote
testimony, the sense almost of awe with which he would
announce some fresh fragment of evidence, however
grotesque or ridiculous. No devotee of the older religion
hunted for souls more eagerly than Myers hunted for
news of ghost stories and telepathy and roaming per-
sonalities and inexplicable tricks of hypnotism and
magic. I remember in sorting evidence with him
noting how his spirits would rise as the record of some
particular incident would deepen in mystery and horror.
It was a lifelong disappointment to him that, although
he pursued ghosts with the ardour of the youthful
Shelley, the actual vision was never vouchsafed to him.
No evidence of fraud deterred him. No ridicule in the
least affected him. After the detection of deliberate
cheating in one notorious " medium " at Cambridge,
his companions (perhaps wisely) refused to have any
further communication with her. Myers was undeterred
He was summoned to fresh seances at Paris ; and I
well remember being called to meet him on his
return and finding him triumphantly convinced that
in this particular case phenomena had occurred beyond
the possibilities of human trickery to devise.

66

FREDERIC MYERS

The generations of undergraduates who passed so
quickly by him regarded all this with perplexity. He
was a magnificent lecturer upon literature and much
in demand for literary societies. He always charged
his discussion of his subject Swinburne, Morris, and
the rest with the expression of the one hope which
burned like a flame at his heart. He would gather
small bands of students, attracted somewhat fearfully,
to listen to his occult revelations. One meeting especially
I recollect, in which, after Myers had told a succession
of ever more blood-curdling ghost stories, in the breath-
less silence a late arrival suddenly crashed against the
door outside. The effect was somewhat similar to the
knocking at the gate after the murder of Macbeth, an
immediate galvanic shock in the " startled air."

His own life and vitality seemed more convincing
evidence of immortality than all these testimonies of
strange forces. It was impossible to conceive that
strong soul passing into nothingness, the triumphant
energy meekly bowing before the supremacy of death.
His purpose was ever to sail beyond the sunset.
Exultation was in all his doing. It is upon a note
of exultation he closes his brief testimony of a life
given to high causes. Exultation remains in the great
line which is carved upon the tablet erected to his
memory beyond the walls of Rome, in that most sacred
spot of English ground outside the boundaries of Eng-
land. Above the tomb where lies all that is mortal
of Shelley, stands the self-chosen summary of his life's
devotion

ApVVflCVOQ T\VTt \j/V)(f)V KCU VOffTOV tYctlpWV,

" Striving to save my own soul, and my comrades
homeward way."

67

GEOEGE GISSING

OF all the losses which literature has lately endured,
the death of Gissing stands out as most exhibit-
ing the ragged edge of tragedy. That Death should
come just at the wrong moment was indeed entirely
congruous with a life which seemed all through the
sport of the gods. The irony of some malign or
malicious power seemed to be laid upon the course of
this troubled existence. It was almost with a clutch
of some frantic laughter a laughter more desolate
than tears that there came to his friends, at the
moment when life at last seemed beginning, the news
that life was at an end.

One's whole being revolted against such a bitter
bludgeoning of fate. Readers of "Mark Rutherford"
will remember the restrained but passionate irony of
the close. After the unendurable years are over, when
life has emerged into afternoon, with a prospect of
light at eventide, a few dispassionate sentences tell
of a sudden chance chill, a few days' struggle, and
then another of earth's unimportant millions lies quiet
for ever. So it was with George Gissing. A long
struggle against heavy odds, the experience of the
worst, public neglect and private tragedies, had at last
given place to something like hopefulness and fame.
Recognition, long deserved, had arrived. The crudest
of life's cruelties had vanished. A beniguer outlook, a

68

GEORGE GISSING

softer, kindlier vision of the " farcical melodrama " of
man's existence had been apparent in these later
months. The words of the last of his books he saw
published sound strangely prophetic. "We hoped" so
he wrote of " Henry Byecroft " "we hoped it would
all last for many a year ; it seemed, indeed, as though
Ryecroft had only need of rest and calm to become
a hale man." "It had always been his wish to die
suddenly. . . . He lay down upon the sofa in his study,
and there as his calm face declared passed from
slumber into the great silence."

This is not the time to tell the details of that
troubled life, of the tragedy which lay behind that
arduous literary toil and coloured all the outlook with
indignation and pain. Some day, for the edification
or the warning of the children of the future, the
full story will be told. All that it is necessary to
know at the present is contained in those books in
which the author, under the thin veil of fiction, is pro-
testing out of his own heart's bitterness against the
existence to which he has been committed. "For
twenty years he had lived by the pen. He was a
struggling man beset by poverty and other circum-
stances very unpropitious to work." " He did a great
deal of mere hack-work : he reviewed, he translated, he
wrote articles. There were times, I have no doubt,
when bitterness took hold upon him ; not seldom he
suffered in health, and probably as much from moral
as from physical overstrain." The tyranny of this
nineteenth-century Grub Street drove his genius into
a hard and narrow groove. He might have developed
into a great critic witness the promise of his essay on
Dickens. There was humour in him all unsuspected by
the public till the appearance of " The Town Traveller."

69

DE MORTUIS

And a keen eye for natural beauty, and a power of
description of the charm and fascination of places, and
a passionate love of nature and of home were only made
manifest in "By the Ionian Sea," and the last and
most kindly volume.

All this was sacrificed : in part to a perverted sense of
" Mission," the burden, as he thought, laid upon him
to proclaim the desolation of modern life : partly to
a determination to make manifest to all the world
his repugnance and disgust. He remains, and will
remain, in literature as the creator of one particular
picture. Gissing is the painter, with a cold and mor-
dant accuracy, of certain phases of city life, especially
of the life of London, in its cheerlessness and bleak-
ness and futility, during the years of rejoicing at the
end of the nineteenth century. If ever in the future
the long promise of the Ages be fulfilled, and life
becomes beautiful and passionate once again, it is to
his dolorous pictures that men will turn for a vision
of the ancient tragedies in a City of Dreadful Night.

Gissing rarely if ever described the actual life of
the slum. He left to others the natural history of
the denizens of " John Street " and the " Jago." The
enterprise, variety, and adventurous energy of those
who led the existence of the beast would have dis-
turbed with a human vitality the picture of his dead
world. It was the classes above these enemies of
society, in their ambitions and pitiful successes, which
he made the subject of his genius. He analyses into
its constituent atoms the matrix of which is composed
the characteristic city population. With artistic power
and detachment he constructs his sombre picture, till
a sense of almost physical oppression comes upon the
reader, as in some strange and disordered dream.

70

There are but occasional vivid incidents ; the vitriol-
throwing in "The Nether World"; the struggle of
the Socialists in " Demos," as if against the ten-
tacles of some slimy and unclean monster ; the par-
ticular note of revolt sounded in " New Grub Street,"
when the fog descends not merely upon the multitude
who acquiesce, but upon the few who resist. But in
general the picture is merely of the changes of time
hurrying the individuals through birth, marriage, and
death, but leaving the general resultant impression
unchanged. Vanitas vanitatum is written large
over an existence which has " never known the sun-
shine nor the glory that is brighter than the sun."
Human life apprehends nothing of its possibilities of
sweetness and gentleness and high passion. The
energies, rude or tired, flaming into pitiful revolt or
accepting from the beginning the lesson of inevitable
defeat, end all alike in dust and ashes.

The Islington of " Demos," the Camberwell of " The
Year of Jubilee," the Lambeth of " Thyrza" : how the
whole violent soul of the man revolted against existence
set in these! The outward obsession of the grey
labyrinth seemed to reflect the spirit of a race of
tragic ineptitude. Comfort has been attained, and some
security. But beauty has fled from the heart, and the
hunger for it passed into a vague discontent. Religion
has lost its high aspiration. Passion has become
choked in that heavy air. The men toil the decent
and the ignobly decent without ever a sense of illu-
mination in the dusty ways, or the light of a large
purpose in it all. The women what an awful picture-
gallery of women appears in Gissing's tales of suburban
existence ! nag and hate, are restless with boredom
and weariness, pursue ignoble, unattainable social

71

DE MORTUIS

aspirations, desire without being satisfied. The whole
offers a vision more disquieting and raucous than any
vision of the squalor of material failure. Here, the
Showman seems to announce at intervals, always
with an ironic smile, here is the meaning of culture,
civilisation, religion in the forefront of your noisy
"progress," in the city of your heart's desire.

" Her object," said Mr. Hutton, of George Eliot's
" Middlemarch," " is to paint not the grand defeat, but
the helpless entanglement and miscarriage of noble
aims, to make us see the eager stream of high purpose,
not leaping destructively from the rock, but more or
less silted up in the dreary sands of modern life." I
have often thought this might serve for a verdict upon
all Gissing's characteristic work. To produce this
result he had, indeed, to cut out great sections of
human activity. The physical satisfaction in food and
the greater physical satisfaction in drink ; the delight
in the excitement of betting, an election, an occasional
holiday ; the illumination which comes to a few, at
least, from a spiritual faith or an ideal cause ; even the
commonest joy of all, " the only wage," according to
the poet, which "love ever asked " :

" A child's white face to kiss at night,
A woman's smile by candlelight " :

all these, if introduced at all, appear merely to relieve
for a moment the picture of the desolation of London's
incalculable, bewildered millions. Gissing set himself a
legitimate artistic effort : the representation of modern
life in a certain aspect, seen under a certain mood. It
is London, not in the glories of starlight or sunset, but
under the leaden sky of a cold November afternoon.
The third of Henley's "London Voluntaries" is the

73

GEORGE GISSING

characteristic outward scene of Mr. Gissing's gaunt
picture; in which the " afflicted city "

" seems

A nightmare labyrinthine, dim and drifting,
With wavering gulfs and antic heights, and shifting,
Bent in the stuff of a material dark,
Wherein the lamplight, scattered and sick and pale,
Shows like the leper's living blotch of bale."

The vision does not even possess the sense of magic
and mystery of twilight and gathering night. The
universe is simply raw and wretched, with a wind
scattering the refuse of the gutter, and, too hideous
and grotesque even to evoke compassion, a few old
tramps and forlorn children shivering in the cold.

It was hecause we saw in Gissing's later works an
escape from this insistent and hideous dream, a
promise of a warmer, saner outlook upon human develop-
ment and desire, that we felt as a kind of personal
outrage the news of his early death. For skilled,
artistic craftsmanship he held the first place in the ranks
of the younger authors of to-day. He was only forty-
six years old. The later books seemed to open possi-
bilities of brilliant promise. The bitterness had become
softened. The general protest against the sorry scheme
of human things seemed to be passing into a kind of
pity for all that suffers, and an acceptance with thank-
fulness of life's little pleasures. The older indignation
had yielded to perplexity as of a suffering child. With
something of that perplexity with a new note of
wistfulness, the sudden breaking of the springs of
compassion George Gissing passes from a world of
shadows which he found full of uncertainty and pain.

73

SPENCER AND CAELJLE
A COMPARISON

HERBERT SPENCER tells, in his autobiography,
how shortly after his migration to London George
Henry Lewes took him to see a writer whose work he
had already examined with interest. " My visits num-
bered three," he notes, " or at the outside four, always
in company with Lewes, and then I ceased to go. I
found that I must either listen to his absurd dogmas in
silence, which it was not in my nature to do, or get into
fierce arguments with him, which ended in our glaring
at one another. As the one alternative was impracticable
and the other disagreeable, it resulted that I dropped
the acquaintanceship." And Spencer goes on to com-
plain of Carlyle that " he thought in a passion " (and,
hence, could not be regarded as a philosopher, who, above
all others, thinks calmly) ; that the " old Norse ferocity "
was strong within him ; that he " lacked co-ordination
alike intellectually and morally." " He had a daily
secretion of curses which he had to vent on somebody
or something."

A verbatim report of these three or four meetings
would prove to-day inimitable reading. For when Car-
lyle and Spencer came together there was an encounter
not only of two personalities but of two civilisations.

74

SPENCER AND CARLYLE

Spencer exhibited a life, for perhaps the first time in
history, entirely organised on a rational and scientific
basis. Each separate action was referred to general
laws. Guidance was sought in the complicated tangle
of life not in any "venture of faith," still less in the
commands of human emotion ; but in a codified system
of evolutionary ethics, with a deliberate search for such
elements of pleasure as could be obtained without inter-
ference with the pleasure of others. In places this
system of natural morality became as casuistical and
exacting as any of the rules and systems of venial and
mortal sins of the Catholic moralists. Spencer turned
back upon past action directed towards a certain end to
examine with an almost pathetic refinement whether as
a matter of fact the end has been attained ; whether,
for example, he had derived more happiness from billiards
than might have been derived from other alternative
occupation ; whether he was justified in the use of
opium ; whether in his final examination of his whole
life history he could pronounce, with some anticipation
of an ultimate verdict of a Day of Judgment, that he had
chosen aright in determining to devote his life to the cause
of Evolution. He acknowledged a continuous tradition
of Nonconformist upbringing and ancestry, with no cross-
ing of the pure stock so that by inheritance he became
the very incarnation of the " Dissidence of Dissent."
This, overlaid with the inheritance of the " acquired
characters " of three generations of schoolmasters, ex-
plained sufficiently to himself the prevalence of those
unamiable characteristics which he confessed with such
naive simplicity. An aggressive disagreement with
persons and accepted traditions, refusal always to
brook contradiction, that inability to tolerate error in
others which compelled him always to set them right

75

when wrong, combined to make him a difficult person in
society. "No one will deny," he said, "that I am
much given to criticism. Along with exposition of my
own views, there has always gone a pointing out of
defects in the views of others." The "tendency to
fault-finding is dominant disagreeably dominant."
Such fault-finding, he dismally announced, had brought
into his life a double loss on the one hand leading
" to more or less disagreeableness in social inter-
course "; on the other "it has partially debarred me
from the pleasures of admiration by making me too
much awake to mistakes and shortcomings."

Carlyle's dissent from current opinion was, indeed, as
intolerant and even louder- voiced ; but it was passionate
instead of rational, and hence far easier to endure. All
his opponents were consigned in storm to the nether pit.
The extravagant ferocity of denunciation was streaked
with gleams of wild humour revealing a human being,
an inspired, wilful, petulant child. There was nothing
of the child in Spencer. The fault-finding was thin-
lipped, rational, probably in every case justified, and
hence intolerable. Each of these men was the product
of inherited traditions of belief and conduct : of traditions
which regarded happiness as outside the legitimate
objects of man's endeavour. When Spencer attempted
to organise his life upon an hedonistic basis all these
traditions, which had become part of the very fibre of his
being, leapt upwards in protest and rendered the experi-
ment a failure. He was ever asking himself, " what
have been the motives prompting my career how much
have they been egoistic and how much altruistic?"
Caught in such cobwebs he painfully laboured through
the whole catalogue ; examining in detail how far in
controversy "the wish for personal success has gone

SPENCER AND CARLYLE

along with the wish to establish the truth," and how far
the one has predominated over the other ; or, whether
he would have done better to marry ; or explaining
how " in the kind of beneficence distinguishable as
positive," the incentives " have been commonly neutra-
lised by dislike to taking the requisite trouble." And
every day as it passed became a subject of critical study
and regret because it had gone charged with less positive
pleasure than might have been.

In the " reflections " at the end of the autobiography
Spencer told of a chance incident of travel " in the days
of my difficulties when compelled to travel in third-class
carnages." " Opposite to me," he says, " sat a man who,
at the time I first observed him, was occupied in eating
food he had brought with him I should rather say
devouring it, for his mode of eating was so brutish as to
attract my attention and fill me with disgust, a disgust
which verged into anger. Some time after, when he
had finished his meal and become quiescent, I was
struck by the woebegone expression of his face. Years
of suffering were registered on it, and while I gazed on
the sad eyes and deeply-marked lines I began to realise
the life of misery through which he had passed. As I
continued to contemplate the face, and to understand
all which its expressions of distress implied, the pity
excited in me went to the extent of causing that con-
striction of the throat which strong feeling sometimes
produces."

This extract might serve as a sample of the whole
life history. The dispassionate pomposity of language,
the dispassionate contemplation of his own emotions,
the absorption first in the nature of the resonances
and reactions produced by external events in the mind
of the individual Herbert Spencer, accompanied by a

77

BE MORTUIS

detachment and cold criticism which frees such absorp-
tion from any charge of selfishness such elements
combined made of those thousand pages one of the
most extraordinary of all human records. It would
appear not impossible, indeed, that the author may
be remembered for the personal history taken up in
old age, and mainly to break the tedium of enforced
idleness, long after the laborious constructions of the
synthetic philosophy have become not only buried, but
forgotten.

Much of the life reads like frank caricature, the kind
of rather cruel satire that used to be written by Mr.
Mallock in his younger days. The reference of each
chance action to large principles, the humourless judg-
ment of events, the laborious justification of fishing or
billiards all these produce an effect which would be
inexpressibly ludicrous but for the pathos of the whole
affair. In the author's earlier years " there was no
sign of marked liking for children," he says in his
quaint, impersonal fashion. " My feeling was of a
tepid kind." Late in life, in an existence "passed
chiefly in bed and on the sofa, I one day, while think-
ing over modes of killing time, bethought me that the
society of children might be a desirable distraction."
Children were demanded and children supplied. The
result was " to awaken, in a quite unanticipated way,
the philoprogenitive instinct," and the society of two
little girls " afforded me a great deal of positive grati-
fication." Henceforward " the presence of a pair of
children, now from this family of the clan, and now from
that, has formed a leading gratification I may say the
chief gratification during each summer's sojourn in the
country." Criticism is struck dumb by such entries as
these. It is life organised on the system of the Data

78

SPENCER AND CARLYLE

of Ethics and the millennium there preached; a man
moving through the rich and passionate experience
of to-day with complete obedience to a reasonable
appeal : a kind of nightmare of an entirely rational
world.

One possible variation from such frantic sanity was
rejected as soon as it was understood. Spencer de-
scribes his early friendship with George Eliot, " the
most admirable woman, mentally, I ever met." He
took her to the opera and the theatre, where he had
free admissions more used " because I had frequently
indeed, nearly always the pleasure of her companion-
ship, in addition to the pleasure afforded by the per-
formance." He was then but thirty- two, and the
philosophy had scarcely been projected. There were
out-of-door walks, discussions on the terrace outside
Somerset House. " People drew inferences." " Quite
definite statements became current." " There were
reports that I was in love with her, and that we were
about to be married. But neither of these reports was
true." In the reflections at the end, forty years after-
wards, some indication of the reason was revealed. He
had described in painful detail her actual physical
appearance. " Usually heads have here and there
either flat places or slight hollows : but her head was
everywhere convex." He had once criticised a great
beauty, alike in face and figure, " I do not quite like
the shape of her head." " This abnormal tendency to
criticise has been a chief factor," he sadly acknow-
ledged, "in the continuance of my celibate life."
" Physical beauty is a sine qua non for me ; as was
once unhappily proved where the intellectual traits
and the emotional traits were of the highest."

Spencer's sturdy individualism produced a complete
79

DE MORTUIS

Disregard of authority, and that contempt or indif-
ference for accepted opinion which was perhaps neces-
sary for the elaboration of a new and unpopular
philosophy. The extraordinary judgments on books
and men scattered through the life are examples both
of this waywardness and of that complete absence
of moral fear which the author also recognised in him-
self. Of Plato, "time after time I have attempted to
read," he said, " and have put it down in a state of
impatience with the indefiniteness of the thinking and
the mistaking of words for things." " To call that a
' dialogue,' " he added, with that disordered common-
sense which was the curse of his existence, " which is
an interchange of speeches between the thinker and his
' dummy,' who says just what it is convenient to have
said, is absurd." For Ballads with recurring burdens
he felt " a kind of vicarious shame, at their inane
repetition of an idea." Commencing Homer, " for the
purpose of studying the superstitions of the early
Greeks," after reading some six books he " felt what
a task it would be to go on felt that I would rather
give a large sum than read to the end." He found
"the tedious enumerations of details of dresses and
sums," the "boyish practice of repeating descriptive
names," "the many absurdities, such as giving the
genealogy of a horse while in the midst of battle," the
"ceaseless repetition of battles and speeches" intoler-
able. Delighted with the "Modern Painters," he
opened the "Stones of Venice" with raised expecta-
tions. " On looking at the illustrations, however, and
reading the adjacent text, I presently found myself
called upon to admire a piece of work which seemed
to me sheer barbarism. My faith in Mr. Buskin's
judgment was at once destroyed, and thereafter I paid

80

SPENCER AND CARLYLE

no further attention to his writings than was implied by
reading portions quoted in reviews or elsewhere."

Such vigorous dismissal became more serious when
the work was a piece of essential criticism in his own
subject. Commencing the reading of Kant's critique,
Spencer fell upon the proposition that " Time and
space are nothing but subjective forms." This " I
rejected at once and absolutely ; and having done so
went no further." "It has always been out of the
question for me to go on reading a book the funda-
mental principle of which I entirely dissent from,"
owing to the "utter incredulity of the proposition
itself" and "the want of confidence in the reason-
ings, if any, of one who could accept a proposition so
incredible." Kant was flung aside. " Whenever in
later years I have taken up Kant's critique I have
similarly stopped short after rejecting its primary pro-
position." It is interesting to remember that two of
the most influential minds of the nineteenth century,
who, if not exactly philosophers, at least dealt largely
with the subject-matter of philosophy the one from
the side of theology, the other from that of the
natural sciences had thus failed to read the work
which has laid the foundation of all future speculation.
If Newman had read Kant earlier in life or Spencer's
impatience of absurdity had not prevented him from
persevering in its study, both the theological and
scientific progress, the " Oxford Movement " and the
" New Reformation," might have been profoundly
modified.

The actual effort demanded in the construction of the
synthetic philosophy was nothing short of heroic. The
struggle through so many years of neglect and failure,
the persistence, through failing health, in poverty, at the

81 G-

cost of final nervous collapse, is an achievement for which
the world is richer, which should go down to the future
as one of the great triumphs of human resolution over
circumstance. After the early years spent in engineer-
ing invention and wanderings, Spencer felt the call to
his life work. Intense mental strain at the age of thirty-
five upon a constitution naturally neurotic he was the
only surviving child of parents both of whom exhibited
marked and painful mental derangement produced
insomnia and mental disturbance, which lasted the
remainder of his life. All excitement had to be avoided,
correspondence declined, the working parts of life
jealously guarded for the great undertaking. Many of
the chapters were dictated at intervals of racquets or
rowing, the only practicable method a quarter of an
hour's exercise, then ten minutes' dictation, then exercise
again.

No less heroic was the long struggle for persistence
against poverty. There is a letter written to John
Stuart Mill inquiring concerning the possibility of a
post at the India Office, which is almost elemental in
its simplicity and dignity. " Unhappily my books have
at present no adequate sale," writes the author. " Not
only have they entailed upon me the negative loss of
years spent without remuneration, but also a heavy
positive loss in unrepaid expenses of publication. What
little property I had has been thus nearly all dissipated.
And now that I am more anxious than ever to persevere,
it seems likely that I shall be unable to do so. My
health does not permit me to spend leisure hours in
these higher pursuits, after a day spent in remunerative
occupation. And thus there appears no alternative but
to desist."

After an attempt to issue the books by subscription,
82

SPENCER AND CARLYLE

the failure of adequate support again threatened abandon-
ment. To prevent this Mill offered to guarantee the
expenses of future publication and past losses " a
simple proposition," as he termed it, " of co-operation
for an important public purpose, for which you give
your labour and have given your health." The letters
in which this offer " a manifestation of feeling between
authors that has rarely been paralleled " was made by
Mill and declined by Spencer are permanent assets in
the honourable record of literature.

Eventually, partly through liberal support in America,
partly through small inherited legacies, the work went
on. " I am quite content to give my labour for nothing.
I am content even to lose something by unrepaid costs
of authorship. But it is clear that I shall not be able
to bear the loss that now appears likely." Such were
the efforts by which a philosophy not remote and
difficult, but perhaps the most widely popular of all
nineteenth-century expositions, could alone become
articulate.

The cost to its originator in vital power was irre-
parable. At the end he discussed whether he had
chosen well. Financially, " it was almost a miracle
that I did not sink before success was reached."
" One who devotes himself to grave literature must
be content to remain celibate." "Adequate apprecia-
tion of works not adapted to satisfy popular desires is
long in coming, if it ever comes." Against such tardy
recognition he set the exasperation of misstatement and
the anger of threatened interests and offended prejudice.
" Do I regret that I was not stopped by such dis-
suasions ? " he mournfully asked. " I cannot say yes."
So great was the impulse to proclaim the truth that any
resistance would merely have produced " chronic irrita.-

83

DE MORTUIS

tion hardly to be borne." " Once having become
possessed by the conception of evolution in its compre-
hensive form, the desire to elaborate and set it forth
was so strong that to have passed life in doing some-
thing else would, I think, have been almost intolerable."

To some, and especially to those hailing the synthetic
philosophy as immortal, the triumph of the achievement
may seem amply to compensate the ruin of its cost.
I must confess a different impression. An enormous
sadness broods over Spencer's life history. At the
beginning are the shadowy recollections of ancestors,
of hard, ioyless lives, whose ultimate impression
is one of futility and failure. One grandfather
appears as a gaunt, pitiful figure, whose mental decay
"took the form of supposing that he had matters of
business to look after, and led to rambles through the
town with a vain desire to fulfil them." The other is
" the image of a melancholy-looking old man sitting by
the fireside, rarely saying anything and rarely showing
any signs of pleasure." The substitution of a conscious
creed of hedonism for the stern Puritan survey of life
seemed to bring but little benefit to their descendant.
All through happiness proves elusive : the secret of
well-being is not apprehended ; the sense of failure and
baffled purposes is written large over the whole story.
At one period all his friends urged him to marry as a
remedy for his nervous affections. " Ever since I was
a boy," he sorrowfully writes, " I have been longing to
have my affections called out. I have been in the habit
of considering myself but half alive, and have often said
that I hoped to begin to live some day."

That "some day" never arrived. To the end exis-
tence was woven in a kind of bloodless scheme of moral
principle, with the changes rung on egoistic and altruistic

84

SPENCER AND CARLYLE

impulse ; as divorced from the life of men who love
and hunger and desire, as the vision of the under-
world of the Greek hereafter to those who shivered
at its advent. In the later years the fame of Herbert
Spencer has gone out through all lands. Him-
self, an old man, wearied, and much concerned with
his maladies, is passing to his grave amid mournful
memories. For a few minutes in the morning he can
dictate perhaps half a page of his biography. " Through
the rest of the day the process of killing time has to be
carried on as best it may." Walking has to be re-
stricted to a few hundred yards ; reading of the lightest
kind proves as injurious as working ; conversation has
to be kept within narrow bounds ; recreation is im-
possible, " two games of backgammon" having " caused
a serious relapse." At night, in spite of the use of
opium, there is never a full, continuous sleep. "No
ingenuity," was his pathetic summary, "can prevent
weariness."

All outside the tangible, material universe had been
rejected at the beginning, and rejected almost without a
pang ; relegated to the region of the Unknowable and
seemingly left there without any further interest or con-
cern. Keligion never left him because it never came
to him. " Memory does not tell me the extent of my
divergence from current beliefs," he here confesses.
" The ' creed of Christendom ' was evidently alien to
my nature, both emotional and intellectual. The ex-
pressions of adoration of a personal being, the utterance
of laudations, and the humble professions of obedience,
never found in me any echoes." Early he wrote, "We
cannot know " over all the ultimate questions of the
Universe ; and, with his entirely reasonable mind, de-
clined any further to trouble himself about them.

85

BE MORTUIS

Occasionally, as when after his only game of golf with
Huxley, he sees some boys bathing and wonders how
such a creature as man has attained such dominance
over the beasts of the field, some of the disordered and
inexplicable things of life strike his fancy. But for the
most part that sense of incongruity which is the founda-
tion of humour was absent ; wanting not only in the
pleasant fancies of verbal play but in the large and
fundamental ironies of things which form the soul of
tragedy. To a mind so entirely synthetic the universe
came to arrange itself in relations, cubes, and parallels,
an orderly framework ; and the elements which would
not fit into this definite scheme of cause and effect were
quietly dropped out of sight. Even the great bereave-
ments common to the lot of man awaken no sense of
deeper meanings or clamorous, unanswered questionings.
After the death of his mother the loss which he seemed
to have felt most deeply he laments, with sorrow but
with a reasoned outlook, a life " of monotonous routine,
very little relieved by positive pleasure." The utmost
he will allow is regret for " the dull sense of filial
obligations which exist at the time when it is possible
to discharge them, contrasted with the keen sense of
them which arises when such discharge is no longer
possible." Some natural tears he shed, but dried them
soon ; convincing himself, with more success than the
philosopher in " Rasselas," of the folly of grieving over
irrevocable things.

Only at the end, when he is suddenly confronted
with the brooding menace of death, does he realise
the fact that beyond the evolutionary scheme were
strange unfathomed possibilities, that the reason of man
was but a tiny rushlight in an immense solitude, a
plumb-line swung into the midst of an unbounded deep.

86

SPENCER AND CARLYLE

With Tennyson, he tremhles before a vision of Vastness,
the abysm strewn with stars and the great cold beyond
their transitory flames. He gazes back into a waste of
time, forward into a future like a shoreless sea. He
can make no meaning of the world itself, the strange
life spreading in the depths of ocean, the thousand
types which have for ever gone. The insistent query
haunts him, " To what end ? " Along with this is
the paralysing thought, " What if of all this thus in-
comprehensible to us there exists no comprehension
anywhere." Suddenly he finds a new sympathy
awakened within him towards the adherents of the
religions which he had formerly despised ; seeing these,
as it were, the gathering of men together for warmth
and companionship in the darkness of space, and the
silence. "Keligious creeds" so he concludes his
astonishing narrative " I have come to regard with
a sympathy based on community of need ; feeling that
dissent from them results from inability to accept the
solutions offered, joined with the wish that solutions
could be found."

In the life of Carlyle we are breathing an entirely
different atmosphere. The contrast cuts deep into the
basis of being. Spencer is devoted above all things
to liberty as an end. "As if it were a sin to control,
or coerce into better methods human swine in any
way," is Carlyle's scornful comment upon reading
Mill's defence of the same position. Spencer again
is at the heart of the scientific movement, the "New
Eeformation," which was to create new heavens and
a new earth. " Can you really turn a ray of light on
its axis by magnetism?" Carlyle shouts scornfully;
"and if you could, what should I care?" Beyond

87

DE MORTUIS

these questions of opinion is the fundamental divergence
in the outlook upon experience and its meaning. If
Spencer's life was maimed by a too complete limitation
to the things which are seen, Carlyle's was troubled by
too insistent apprehension of the Unseen Universe. In
an entry in his journal he describes how " I have been
at Mrs. Austin's, heard Sydney Smith for the first time
guffawing, other persons prating, jargoning. To me,
through these thin cobwebs, Death and Eternity sate
glaring." And the Vision of Death and Eternity,
glaring through all that travail of eighty years, was
not conducive to tranquillity.

In one of his letters Carlyle tells how, after a period
of severe mental strain, he rode down solitary into
Sussex: through "the Norman Conqueror's country,"
the " green chalk hills, pleasant villages, good people,
and yellow corn." "It is all, in my preternatural
sleepless mood," he writes, "like a country of miracle
to me. I feel it strange that it is there, that I am here."
The sentence might stand for the secret of that
violent life. The record is of one moving through
a drowsy world in a " preternatural sleepless mood";
and the nineteenth century, however to the dulled
eye mechanical and grey, is to this man always " a
country of miracle." The sense of magic, of en-
chantment, hangs over the whole history. The present,
so mean as it appears and so commonplace, has become
transfigured with something of a glory only in general
realised when that present has become the past and to-
day has consented to be yesterday. The world of Nature
is everywhere charged with glamour, silences and
appeals which awaken emotion beyond the power of
words. The world of man, the turmoil of politics
and society chatter, is stricken through with the

88

SPENCER AND CARLYLE

sense of great issues and a purpose beyond time. The
humble society of peasants living obscurely in remote
regions, the deaths and births and affections which form
the common lot of common humanity, are illuminated
with colours which are the stuff of dreams, and set in a
background of all the Eternities.

It is this transformation of the drab things of to-day
which gives this man his power of fascination and
wonder. In the letters is the real Carlyle : the man in
his true self: " a wild man," as he describes himself,
"a man disunited from the fellowship of the world he
lives in." It is a life lived at a furnace heat of emotion,
extravagant in laughter, in affection, in denunciation.
He passes from a ferocity of contempt or an uncontrolled,
shaggy humour, to outbreaks of appealing and mournful
beauty. He beholds always good and evil visibly at
death grips in the lives of men. Like his own favourite
hero, he has enough fire within him to burn up the
sins of the whole world. Consumed with a continuous
restlessness, he is ever seeking quiet. " Learn to
sit still, I tell you : how often must I tell you," he
breaks out. "I persist in my old determination to be
at rest," he declares again and again. " God help us
all!" "God be merciful!" "As God lives I am
weary ! " these are his constant burden. " Solitude
is indeed sad as Golgotha ; but it is not mad like
Bedlam ! " The world of wild warfare came more and
more to be contrasted with a future beyond the storms
of time. " We have hope through our Maker's good-
ness," he writes to his mother, "of a time that shall
be always calm weather." " The soul that has been
devoutly loyal to the Highest," he cries again, "that
soul has the eternal privilege to hope. For good is
appointed it, and not evil, as God liveth." The best

89

DE MORTUIS

good for one so fire-tost and tormented is rest ; " such
rest as God's holy will has appointed, and as no man
knows."

Such thoughts were the only consolation after each
outburst of astonished anger at the madness of men.
"Poor Protectionists," he flared forth after the Disraeli
Budget of 1851, " there never were men so ' sold '
since Judas concluded his trade." " This Jew, how-
ever, will not hang himself ; no, I calculate he has a
great deal more of evil work to do in the world yet, if
he lives." " Whatever British infatuation has money
in its purse, votes in its pocket, and no tongue in its
head, here is the man to he a tongue for it." Imme-
diately he turns from such a ravening spectacle to that
eternity which was ever his "strong tower." "The
day is drawing down (with the generation I belong to),
and the tired labourers one by one are going home.
There is rest there, I believe, for those who could never
find any before. God is great. God is good."

All his letters are crowded with those verdicts on
men which read so ferociously, whose first publica-
tion scared the company of Carlyle worshippers, and
tumbled to pieces the monstrous image they had
erected of the Apostle of Silence. Beneath the Carlyle
charged with a cold, intellectual restraint, weighing his
words, preaching endurance and an austere, ethical
creed a lath-and-plaster figure the real man is
emerging ; infinitely more human, infinitely more
lovable ; lacking, above all things, restraint, seeing the
better course, but unable to follow it, violent, with
fierce affection, drawing deep and fiercely the outlines
and shadows of things. The prim moralist is offended
at the reckless scattering of contemptuous and fiery
judgments. Only those who have some similarity of

90

SPENCER AND CARLYLE

temperament, who are accustomed to speak and think
in superlatives, will understand the spirit in which these
verdicts are cast forth ; understanding, they will refuse
to condemn.

There is a wild humour about him, a mingling of
denunciation with a kind of elemental laughter, in
which the bitterness is dissolved. After reading a
Quarterly attack on Kingsley and Maurice, "very
beggarly Crokerism," " no viler mortal," Carlyle
suddenly ejaculated, "calls himself man than old
Croker at this time." " One Merivale " attacked him
in a review. " He is a slight, impertinent man," was
Carlyle's comment, " with good Furnival's Inn faculty,
with several dictionaries and other succedanea about
him small knowledge of God's universe as yet, and
small hope of now getting much." Of the theory of
life of this economist " it struck me I had never seen in
writing so entirely damnable a statement." "It is to
me not a sorrowful prognostic," he concluded, " that
the day of that class of politicians does in all ways draw
towards its close."

Others who had not thus the temerity deliberately to
draw upon themselves the lightning of the gods were
not spared. Of Jowett, " a poor little good-humoured
owlet of a body " was the verdict, " ' Oxford Liberal,'
and very conscious of being so : not knowing right hand
from left otherwise. Ach Gott ! " Of Palmerston, " a
tall man, with some air of greediness and cunning," was
the unflattering description, " and a curious fixed smile
as if lying not at the top, but at the bottom of his
physiognomy." The worthy philanthropists of the
forties became "scraggy critics of the 'benevolent'
school." Louis Philippe was dismissed with con-
temptuous pity : "I begin to be really sorry for him,

91

DE MORTUIS

poor old scoundrel." "An old man now, and has not
learned to be an honest man he learns, or may learn,
that the cunuingest knavery will not serve one's turn
either." The " Bentham Radical Sect " were treated
to a crescendo of vituperation till they were finally dis-
missed as " wretched, unsympathetic, scraggy Atheism
and Egoism," which Nature will never make " fruitful
in her world." "Enough, thou scraggy Atheism; go
thy ways, wilt thou ! "

But there were enthusiasms for famous men no less
superlative ; in addition to that continual flow of un-
clouded family affection, the love of the clan, of the
peasant for the peasant family; above all the whole-
hearted elemental devotion of the son for the mother
who bore him, which illuminates all the violent and
passionate correspondence of nearly fifty years. In a
memorable letter to Browning, " You seem to possess a
rare spiritual gift," is the generous tribute, " poetical,
pictorial, intellectual, by whatever name we may prefer
calling it." " Persist in God's name, as you best see
and can, and understand always that my true prayer for
you is, good speed in the name of God." There was
often a touching gratitude for favours given, a surprise
at the toleration extended by " people in the highest
degree zealous to accommodate the surprising monster
who has been stranded among them." " Kindness is
frequent in this world," he declared in a sudden
quietude, "if we reckon upward from zero (as were
fair), not downwards from infinity ; and always very
precious, the more so the rarer."

Carlyle saw with the eye of the mystic, the eye
of the prophet. Common things lost their hard
outlines. The world appeared as a procession of
spectres and shadows. Again and again he cried

92

SPENCER AND CARLYLE

that man is of the substance of dreams, and his little
life is rounded with a sleep. " The dead seem as
much my companions as the living," he asserted in
one letter. " Death as much present with me as
life." Sometimes the effect was ridiculous. The Devil
visibly walks in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, inspiring the
unspeakable fowls of his neighbours to crow lustily in
the morning, or stimulating the thirst for gin of the
harassed domestics. More frequently, however, the
vision closes in splendour. The things of the present
are charged with the sense of mystery. The homely
virtues and affections of the Carlyle clan are carried
into a region of high emotion. The chatter and gossip
of society are seen but as a flickering candle flame in
the great red glare of sunrise. And in each successive
bereavement Carlyle is caught up into regions of mystic
sorrow and rejoicing, " a sacredness that led one beyond
tears."

Each obscure human life was for him a matter of
infinite import. London, as he looked down on it from
the Surrey hills, " its smoke rising like a great dusky-
coloured mountain, melting into the infinite clear sky,"
became a meeting-place of Eternities in the " ever-
flowing stream of life and death." In the graveyard
of the dead, where " they all lay so still and dumb,
those that were once so blithe and quick at sight of us ;
gathered to their sleep under the long grass," the old
man " could not forbear a kind of sob, like a child's,
out of my old worn heart, at first sight of all this."
Read if you can without emotion the letter, magnificent
in its simplicity, in which Carlyle describes to his
brother in Canada the last days and death of his
mother. It is the end of an obscure life, full of toils
and sorrows ; the dust returning to the earth, as it was,

93

DE MORTUIS

through that last indignity which is the common lot
of man. But to the eyes of one watching with a
love unconquered by the fretfulness of time, the voyage
of this humble soul " through the gloomy clouds of
death " was charged with a solemn splendour and
triumph. All the mystery of the greatness of human
existence gathered round the moment of the passing
into eternity of the spirit, returning to the God who
gave it.

The man to whom each solitary life was thus so
sacred had the faith at bottom which alone can con-
secrate all human progress. He had, indeed, no certain
solution of ultimate mysteries. But he refused to put
them aside. " God is great ! God is good ! " is his
continual burden ; " there remaineth a rest," his per-
petual prayer. " The ruins of time build the mansions
of Eternity " is the one sustaining hope with the passing
of the years. And all his longing goes out towards a
meeting with those whom he loved, now so quiet, in
" the Silent Kingdoms " where all that troubled the lot
of man " shall there be without the walls for evermore."

In such a contrast between the mystic and the man of
science is summed up much of the hunger and disturbance
of an age. Spencer's story of his existence is like the
even passage of a still and cloudy day. The hours pass
with scarcely perceptible change. There is a light in
the sky, dull, if cold and clear, slowly fading with the
coming of the night. Carlyle's life-history is like a day
of perpetual unrest. There is the flare of the dawn
with sunshine succeeding; and thunder-clouds roll up
in tempest with lightning and storm ; and the clouds
are torn apart for a moment, revealing the blue sky
beyond ; and the sun sets in crimson and yellow light,

94

SPENCER AND CARLYLE

with a menace of disquietude still on the horizon, rain
and moaning wind, when darkness suddenly blots out
the whole troubled scene.

The one story ends in a vision of desolation. An irony
worthy of an ancient and tragic fate compelled the man
who, more than any previous thinker, had fashioned his
action upon rational and consistent ends, most com-
pletely to acknowledge failure. The conscious search for
the prize resulted in the cry that the prize had somehow
eluded the seeker ; and the neglect of all irrational
things love and human comradeship, the larger
emotions, patriotism, and the losing of self in an ideal
cause evolved but the old cry of weariness, and the
failure of orderly life to satisfy man's desires and his
dreams.

The other, from the heart of uncertainty and storm,
under the purple sky and sunset, lifts up his hope
triumphant above the things of time, sure in the
consummation of the victory and the abiding rest
beyond. " It was the Most High God that made
mothers," he testifies, " and the sacred affection of
children's hearts ; yes, it was He : and shall it not, in
the end, be all well : on this side of death, or beyond
death ? We will pi-ay once more from our inmost heart
if we can, ' Our Father which art in Heaven, Thy will
be done ' ! "

" Alas ! the inexorable years," he cries, " that cut
away from us, one after another, the true souls whom
we loved, who loved us truly, that is the real bitterness
of life." " How could one live," he had before written,
"if it were not for Death?" "We ourselves, my
friend" this is his conclusion of the whole matter "it
is not long we have to stay behind ; we, too, shall find a
shelter in the Silent Kingdoms ; and much Despicability

95

DE MORTUIS

that barked and snarled incessantly round us here shall
there be without the walls for evermore. Blessed are the
Dead. . . . God is great, say the Moslems; to which
we add only, God is Good ; and have not, nor ever shall
have, any more to say."

So in faith and perplexity, the one with an unanswered
question on his lips, the other with the great longing in
his heart still unsatisfied, these two men went down into
darkness : and the grasses blow above their graves.

A CONTRAST

OF all the memorable comparisons in history, in which
two men of supreme talent have been exhibited
struggling through a lifetime for the triumph of conflicting
ideals, none will stand in history more illuminating
than that of Disraeli and Gladstone. The superficial
contrast has been a thousand times emphasised. But
the material is now for the first time available which
can enable the reader to penetrate beneath the surface
show. All the accidents of birth, fortune, and educa-
tion vanish ; and we enter those innermost recesses of
man's being which all men hide from the multitude,
in which the soul, stripped of the illusions of market-
place and arena, is confronted only with itself and with
Eternity.

The careers of Disraeli and Napoleon HE. are the two
great romances of the nineteenth century. Each seemed
for all the earlier time "impossible." Each at the
beginning absurdly failed. Disraeli became the laugh-
ing-stock of England, Napoleon the laughing-stock of
Europe. The grotesque invasions at Strasburg and
Boulogne seemed to certify an enduring collapse to the

97 H

DE MORTUIS

one. Sydney Smith has described the first appearance
of the other at Taunton, and how he was called the Old
Clothes Man by the children and pelted with slippers,
and finally driven out in contempt. But each, confident
in his genius and his star, pressed right onward, and
each attained such dazzling success as must have
excelled even his wildest dreams. The career of both
was closed in eclipse and ruin. Both were assailed with
such ferocity of vituperation as only falls to the few
really great. And both, when all is over, have secured
disciples essaying to erect an image of benevolence and
moral earnestness images which would have astonished
the men who, however self deceived at the last, would
never have mistaken these ungainly creations for por-
traits of themselves.

Disraeli's career was " a romance of the will that
defies circumstance, and moulds the soil where ideas
are to flourish." In the strange figure at the end
as depicted by one of his admirers could be read
all the history of the past. " Few who gazed
on that drawn countenance," says Mr. Sichel, "could
have discerned in it the poetry and enthusiasm of his
prime : only the unworn eyes preserved their piercing
fires, and the sunken jaw was still masterful. A long
discipline of iron self-control, much disillusion, growing
disappointments with crowning triumphs, and latterly a
great desolation, had subdued the fiercer force and the
elastic buoyancy of his heyday. Yet the intellectual
charm, and the spell of mind and spirit had deepened
their outward traces. Fastidious discernment, dis-
passionate will, penetrating insight, courage, patience,
a certain winning gentleness underneath the scorn of
shams, stamp every lineament."

"He was truly unselfish, and he was never known to
98

DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE

blame a subordinate." "In two things only he was
profuse books and light." Unlike his great rival in
this as in so many other characteristics, he was "utterly
careless of money." "Like childless men in general,
he was devoted to children." " He was a firm friend:
loyalty he always extolled as a sovereign virtue." " If
he was always ' the man of destiny/ he was also ever
' faithful unto death.' ' "Of music and art he was a
devotee." " In matters of courtesy he was old-fashioned
and punctilious." "The common and the uncommon
people fascinated him, for in them he found ideas: the
middling charmed him less."

In the world outside also, that austere, pitiless, senti-
mental England of the mid-century, he was ever on
the side of kindness and compassion. He possessed
strong sympathy with labour and the sufferings of the
poor. "He foresaw the overcrowding of huge cities
through the waste of the soil with all its attendant
miseries." With Ruskin he asserted that the English
poor " compared with the privileged of their own land
are in a lower state than any other population compared
with its privileged classes." He was "prouder of his
many social reforms than of his Berlin Treaty." "What
he specially sought to mitigate was irresponsible Pluto-
cracy."

The verdict of history will probably endorse Lord
Acton's judgment upon Disraeli. " The man was more
reputable than his party." He led them first by grati-
fying their hatreds, later by stimulating their hopes. He
led them through strange ways, but ultimately into the
promised land.

The attempt, indeed, to prove that he was " con-
sistent " throughout all his political career, that he
was not " an adventurer," that his only motive was

99

DE MORTUIS

the advancement of high moral causes, is an attempt
compared to which the rehabilitations of Richard Crook-
back and John Lackland were but trifles. No one doubts
Disraeli's greatness ; no one seriously imagines this
greatness to be in the region of morality. His career is a
study for the admirer of a great enterprise conducted
through a lifetime with extraordinary tenacity and
courage. It is an asset for the cynic, the historian, the
detached observer of the absurd comedy of human life ;
not, surely, for the moralist. The attitude of his
admirers is more likely to be that of Mr. Swinburne in
his protest against the whitewashing of Mary Queen of
Scots. " Surely you were something better than
innocent ? " Disraeli knew his world, " the islanders,"
as one of his biographers pleasantly terms them ; and
he knew himself. He had the power of those who have
stripped themselves of all illusions, swallowed all
formulas. He posed, and every one laughed at him;
but step by step he succeeded in deceiving first his party,
then his country, finally himself.

In such a survey, the superficial inconsistencies are
negligible. Whether at first he appeared as a Tory or
a Radical seems entirely irrelevant. Both opinions
were quite reconcilable with his after-life. He hated
the Whigs and the great houses who were excluding
such as he from politics. He hated the middle classes,
the Nonconformists. Above all, he hated that strenuous
assertion of moral ideals which always seemed to him
cant, which was to gather under the leadership of his
great opponent and overthrow him at the last. He
knew mid-century England as few others knew it. His
novels, despite their absurdity and their bizarre, fantastic
language, remain the most illuminating commentaries
upon the changes which this England was undergoing, to

100

which the many were so blind. Against these middle
classes he apprehended, with the insight of genius and
the detachment of the alien, there could he united the
old English families from above and the populace from
below. The Reform Act of '67, denounced as a
betrayal, was merely an attempt practically to realise
this conviction.

His policy was justified by its success. The force
of moral earnestness and enthusiasm was the one
force he could never understand. " I have been induced
to analyse what ' moral ' means are," he once said ;
" first, enormous lying ; second, inexhaustible boasting ;
third, intense selfishness." This solitary mistake ended
his career in apparent ruin. Undoubtedly had he made
an adequate estimate of the power of moral enthusiasm,
he would have adjusted his policy to its demands, and
used it for his own aims.

But his success was never more apparent than after
his death. He became a cult and a great memory.
The romance of his marvellous career became magnified
by time. His policy of uniting the gentlemen of Eng-
land and the democracy which loves a lord against the
manufacturers and middle classes prospered exceedingly.
Other men entered into the heritage he bequeathed to
them ; and England settled down with satisfaction at the
end of the century under the Tory reaction for which
he had worked with such unparalleled ardour and
patience.

In this he was true to his own ideas, and true to
the interests of the class who cried out that he had
betrayed them. The most vehement opponents of th
Franchise Bill of '67, such as the late Lord Salisbury,
were those who lived to reap the great reward of the
policy which they had denounced. Without this

101

DE MORTUIS

alliance the Conservative party were doomed to an
everlasting sterility. With it they ruled England for
seventeen out of the last twenty-five years of the
nineteenth century. For such a transformation they
have to thank this " alien adventurer " whom they never
entirely trusted.

They might, indeed, have remained in power for
decades to come if they could have learnt the lesson he
had tried to teach them : to press forward Social
Reforms, to demonstrate aristocracy as the true and
disinterested leaders of the people : in ruling, to give all
that the people would themselves demand if they them-
selves were in power. In Ireland he would have effected
by English legislation all the reforms that an Irish
Parliament could have effected for herself. At home, he
would have pushed forward his "policy of sewage,"
persistently striven for better houses, better wages,
shorter hours, a humaner life for the working population.
He would have given everything except liberty : for he
was shrewd enough to know that when everything which
liberty demands is given, the demand for liberty itself
becomes suddenly silent.

Secure in the triumph achieved by his policy the
Conservative party have repudiated the principles by
which that triumph was attained. If the coming
collapse of the Tory Government in England will
mark the end not only of a party but of an epoch,
the future will but justify Disraeli's prophecies alike of
success and failure. And if once more the party which
calls itself " Liberal " enters upon power, it will be
because in adversity that party has learnt on the one
hand to forget many of the ideas whose inherent weak-
ness Disraeli descried ; on the other, to remember that
forces more vital than the middle-class individualism of

102

DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE

the mid- Victorian period are necessary for the healing
of the diseases of a newer England.

In face of so magnificent a spectacle as Disraeli's
success, why arouse needless controversy, we may ask,
by attempting to drag in something so irrelevant as
questions of political morality ? "I confess to be
unrecognised at this moment by you," Disraeli writes to
Sir Robert Peel in 1841 " appears to me to be over-
whelming, and I appeal to your own heart to that justice
and that magnanimity which I feel are your characteristics
to save me from an intolerable humiliation." " Do
not destroy all his hopes," Mrs. Disraeli added, " and
make him feel his life has been a mistake." Five
years after, when reminded of this by Sir Robert Peel,
" I can say I never asked a favour of the Government,"
he calmly informed the House of Commons, " not even
one of those mechanical things which persons are
obliged to ask : yet these assertions were always made
in that way, though I never asked a favour; and as
regards myself, I never, directly or indirectly, solicited
office."

Biographers have been concerned to explain this
incident in a thousand impossible apologies. It is
warmly asserted that Disraeli's bitter attacks upon Sir
Robert Peel were not directed by personal revenge for
the rejection of his application. No one now imagines
such an explanation. Disraeli was after too high stakes
to be turned aside by anything so petty as personal
revenge. He attacked Peel because with the eye of
genius he saw that Peel's desertion of the country party
gave him the opportunity for which he had waited half
a lifetime. It was the direct way to the hearts of
the " gentlemen of England " bursting with inarticulate
fury, and welcoming with eagerness their spokesman as

103

DE MORTUIS

their leader. One can regard with admiration the
imperturbable courage and audacity with which he threw
down this challenge to Peel. "In the small hours of
the morning following the debate," Peel " was fishing in
a sea of papers for Disraeli's letter," which he could not
find. Perhaps had he found it the history of England
might have been changed. There is no need to attempt
elaborate explanation of forgotten memory or momentary
madness in this particular incident of a career which
never pretended to acknowledge the impeding limitations
of the accepted moral standards.

To any detached observer of an imaginary Gerolstein
the career is one prolonged miracle. Even with a con-
sciousness of the ruin effected, it is almost impossible
not to cheer the onward advance. At the beginning,
"looking like Gulliver among the Liliputians" suffering
from chronic dyspepsia, he appears on the political
arena "devoured by ambition I did not see any means
of gratifying." He was an alien, without money, with-
out friends ; obviously to the great families of England
an adventurer ; impossible. At the end he has broken
the charmed circle, penetrated to the centre, bent the
great families of England to his will. He drives them
unresisting along roads they dread, towards ends they
cannot foresee. He has become the idol of the
aristocracy. He is the intimate friend of the Queen.
Finally, for one intoxicating moment, he stands in the
full gaze of the world, Dictator of Europe.

One half of the mind refuses to acquiesce. It sees the
lowering of public life, the unscrupulous manipulation
of ideal causes to forward one individual ambition; the
flattery, the adroitness, the despising of men. Estimated
now as if a long time ago and far away the playing upon
pettiness and silly ambition appears the work of one

104

DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE

who, in Mr. Bryce's words, "watched English life and
politics as a student of natural history might watch the
habits of bees or ants." The critic apprehends the
dire consequences of this theatrical display. Modern
Jingoism is one of them, which has poisoned the springs.
Another is the ruin of the Christians of the East.
Here is a heavy price to pay for the set limelight scene
of "Peace with honour."

But the other half of the mind is with him through it
all. We applaud in whole-hearted fashion the spirit,
the pluck, the unconquerable will and determination.
We rejoice with almost a personal triumph as the long,
seemingly so hopeless, efforts of thirty years terminate
in the attainment of the desired goal.

And, indeed, something more reputable remains.
Outside the " game " of politics there was much
altogether admirable. He was a dutiful son, an
affectionate brother. He showed a real kindness to
friends ; a certain magnanimity. The never-wavering
gratitude to his wife for her whole-hearted devotion
illuminates this strange character with tenderness and
emotion. Above all, we owe him a certain cynical
sincerity very useful for " islanders," one of whose
characteristics is an unparalleled power of self-deception.
" Lying is a crime only where it is a cruelty." " When
I meet a man whose name I have utterly forgotten, I
say, ' And how is the old complaint ? '" "No dogmas,
no Deans." In country houses "their table talk is
stable talk." " They think it the battle of Armaged-
don : let us go to lunch." "I am never well save in
action, and then I feel immortal." These and similar
sayings have become part of the current coin of
England's worldly wisdom.

" Every one knows the steps of a lawyer's career he
105

DE MORTUIS

tries in turn to get on, to get honours, to get honest.
This one (of a certain Lord Chancellor) edits hymns
instead of briefs, and beginning by cozening juries he
compounds with heaven by cramming children in a
Sunday school."

There is a real pathos about the end, the pathos
which shrouds the end of all great actors. The play
is nearly played. The harsh world of reality can no
longer be kept out of the kingdom of fantasy and
illusion. Like another great actor, Chateaubriand, he
has " seen so many phantoms defile through the
dream of life." " Yes, but it has come too late," was
the reply to congratulation on the great triumph. " I
am so blind ; I come here : I look round : I see no
one : I go away." " Never defend me," was his last
request.

His definition of the most desirable life as " a con-
tinued grand procession from manhood to the tomb "
had been abundantly realised. " He faced the facts of
life," said one who loved him, " psychological and
spiritual, gravely, I had almost said sorrowfully : he
faced them compassionately." " I had rather live," he
asserted at the end; " but I am not afraid to die." His
verdict upon one of the characters of his creation is
perhaps the last word upon his own intimate soul, the
self which withdrew so securely from the madness of
life's fitful fever : " What they called reality appeared
to him more vain and nebulous than the scenes and
sights of sleep."

II

Mr. Morley's great life and the Acton letters
have revealed now for the judgment of the sympathiser

106

DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE

and the cynic the springs of action of Gladstone's
vast and complex character. Behind all the panorama
of the outward show, the concern which for most men is
all the world and its desires, stands that " heart of
fire " whose history forms one of the most fascinating
chapters in the story of men of renown.

" Not for two centuries," says his biographer, " since
the historic strife of Anglican and Puritan, had our
island produced a ruler in whom the religious motive
was paramount to a like degree." Later, as earlier,
there is the revelation of the inner life : an inner life
" maintained in all its absorbing exaltation day after
day, year after year, amid the ever- swelling rush of
urgent secular affairs."

" Not a devotional child," this " great Christian '
described himself. " The planks between me and all
the sins were so very thin." " The inner life has been
with me extraordinarily dubious, vacillating, and, above
all, complex," is his confession at the end. All the
early years were spent in that rigorous, narrow, evan-
gelical piety which fashioned the characters of most of
the great men of nineteenth-century England. At
Oxford he is organising prayer-meetings. When
twenty-three years old he is refusing race-meetings
and theatres as involving an encouragement of sin.
In the early years of London life he is leading the
limited and austere life of this bleak tradition. At first
he cannot believe in liberty, and is bitterly hostile to
atheists. As late as 1836 he is tormented with doubts
as to whether a Unitarian can be saved. There is one
characteristic scene in his biography, in which " I had
my servant to prayers " before breakfast, and Words-
worth, who has come as a guest, obligingly makes a
third. He is a member of a brotherhood formed by

107

Acland, with rules for systematic exercises of devotion
and works of mercy. Amidst much that is inspiring
there is much also that is tortuous and almost morbid
in these earlier self-examinations and prim rules of
conduct. " My inherited and bigoted misconceptions,"
he afterwards came to call them. He has not yet
escaped from the stifling conception of a very limited
salvation to the larger and freer atmosphere of a Catholic
Church.

The change, when it came, seems to have been en-
tirely independent of the great spiritual upheaval at
Oxford. Quite suddenly, upon his first visit to Rome,
the sight of St. Peter's aroused a longing for a visible
unity of the Church. " The figure of the Church rose
before me as a teacher," in addition to the Bible,
hitherto the sole guide. The old cramping barriers
gave way. A world vision of a vast society and fellow-
ship, divinely ordered and guided for the salvation of
the world, never afterwards left his mind. Hence-
forth, amid " the sublime and sombre anarchy of human
history," he beheld, says Mr. Morley, a Church
Catholic and Apostolic, with " its ineffable and mys-
terious graces " and its " incommeasurable spiritual
force" an immense mystery. "This is the enigma,
and this the solution in faith and spirit, in which
Gladstone lived and moved. In him it gave to the
energies of life their meaning, and to duty its foun-
dation."

But a principle which Oxford failed to teach her
children was already commencing to work. ' ' The
value of liberty as an essential condition of excellence
in human things ' ' was to unite with this passionate
devotion to a Catholic Church, and prove the thread
to that labyrinth of policy which made Gladstone

108

DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE

through all his career the most perplexing of states-
men to his generation. It was to undermine and
east aside all those frameworks of compulsions of
which in the early days he was so determined an
advocate. It led him into the tearing down of an
Anglican Establishment, the abolition of Church rates
and Church tests, and all the policy of liberality and
liberation with which his name will be associated
through all future time. Everything had changed at
the end but his religious ideas. His earlier dogmatisms
and disquietudes crumbled into dust as the years went
by. But the deep bedrock beliefs of his nature in God
and the soul and an immortal life remained always
abiding and secure. " The fundamentals of the
Christian dogma," says Mr. Morley, "are the only
regions in which Mr. Gladstone's opinions have no
history."

The early period is full of the movement of the
Church revival, with all its revolutionary consequences.
Dissuaded from his original desire for the Christian
ministry, Gladstone threw himself into the world of
affairs deliberately as a servant of the Church. "I
contemplate secular affairs," he says, " chiefly as a
means of being useful in Church affairs." "Political
life," says Mr. Morley, "was only part of his religious
life." This crusading energy made him a strange
figure in the realm of early Victorian politics, amongst
that particular section of English life which has never
learnt to take religion seriously. Continually and from
the beginning he is protesting against the infected
atmosphere of Parliament. Of public life, he con-
fesses, " every year shows me more and more that the
ideal of Christian politics cannot be realised in the
State according to present conditions of existence."

109

DE MORTUIS

He was ever desiring a kind of monastic seclusion.
" The tumult of business follows and whirls me day
and night," he cries. He finds no time for tranquil
collection of himself or the cultivation of the things of
the spirit. He " anticipates a time " when he may
" hreathe other air."

But to the party and ideas he stood for his posi-
tion was of supreme importance. The High Church
School consisted mainly of theologians hidden from
the world, of women, of amiable country gentlemen,
endeavouring to maintain feudal ideas in an atmosphere
removed from the new, energetic England. Here was
a man adequate to all occasions, with a miraculous
physical vitality, a frame of steel, toil "his native
element." He stood as the one man of deep religious
conviction endowed with capacity to direct the whirlwind
and control the storm. For the first time a statesman
of unparalleled energy and intellect was to confess him-
self before the world an ardent adherent of these new
doctrines. He was to become the idol of a middle class
utterly alien to the Catholic faith and tradition. He
was to manipulate national finance, to encounter and to
master, at their own poor game, the children of this
world. Through all the crowd of cross purposes and
shabby and pitiful ambitions which make up the uni-
verse of party politics he was to press forward as one on
a journey, passing to a sure end.

Confusion and perplexity were produced in the minds
of his contemporaries by this apparition of a man
with convictions and an ideal amid the shadows and
phantoms of the time. During the first sixteen years
of his political life in close association with his two
greatest friends, Manning and James Hope, he was
daily planning efforts for the restoration of the Church.

110

DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE

The London movement advanced independently of the
Oxford movement, although along parallel lines. "I
stagger to and fro like a drunken man " was Gladstone's
comment when he saw the great leader passing to a
hostile communion. He was never quite in sympathy
with Newman. His thought was too objective for free
communion with that subtle mind. The motive was
never, as in Newman, ardour for a personal salvation,
but shame at " the laying waste of the heritage of the
Lord." The six years that followed were years of a
tense anxiety. Then, in 1851, came the great dis-
ruption and separation which changed the whole vision
of the future. " Fully believing that the death of the
Church of England is among the alternate issues of the
Gorham case," he yet clung to the cause to which his
life had been dedicated. But Manning and Hope
passed over to the other side. " Their going," he
records in his diary, " may be to me a sign that my
work is gone with them." " Nothing like it can ever
happen to me again." It was the close of an epoch.

Ten years were spent in unsatisfactory hesitations.
In 1859 he could still be branded as " the Jesuit of the
closet really devout," and the " Simeon Stylites of his
time." But the principle of liberty was steadily work-
ing. The change from Oxford to South Lancashire
meant an escape from shadows into the strong if cold
light of day. In 1863 he commenced relationships with
Protestant Nonconformists. Their whole point of view
was alien to his own. Often, as in the education con-
troversy, he strained their loyalty to the breaking-point.
They were " attracted by his personal piety, though re-
pelled by its ecclesiastical apparel." While his own
Church regarded with distrust or hatred the greatest
layman it has ever possessed, the Nonconformists

111

DE MORTU1S

followed him with a splendid devotion. "We believe
in no man's infallibility," said Spurgeon; "but it is
restful to be sure of one man's integrity." Only at
the last, when he advocated a scheme for granting self-
government to a Roman Catholic nation containing a
Protestant minority, many with sorrow turned aside and
walked no more with him.

And through all the gigantic endeavour of these later
years the interior life continued its progress. Gladstone
will appear in history as the " practical mystic" ; one of
those apparitions which exercise amid a world of cloudy
purpose so miraculous a power. The consciousness of
personal responsibility, the sense of a Divine call and
election for service, the apprehension of a particular
Providence, the increasing recognition of the necessity
for some definite preparation for the hour of death and
the day of judgment ; these great commonplaces of the
religious life are continually with him. Of a particular
speech at the outset of his career : " A poor perform-
ance," he writes, " but would have been poorer had He
never been in my thoughts, a present and powerful aid."
" On most occasions of very sharp pressure or trial," he
testifies, " some word of Scripture has come home to
me as if borne on angels' wings." In election contests
or Budget speeches he is strengthened by verses of the
Psalms. On his rejection by Oxford University the first
lesson in church supplies his need: " And they shall
fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against
thee, for I am with thee, saith the Lord of Hosts."
Successive birthdays always drove him back in medita-
tion to the basic principles of his faith. On his sixtieth
birthday " The Almighty seems to sustain and spare me
for some good purpose of His own, utterly unworthy as
I know myself to be. Glory be to His name." Ten

112

DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE

years afterwards, at the close of the intoxicating
triumphs of the Midlothian campaign, he " professes to
believe" that the hattle has been fought for justice,
humanity, freedom, law.

" If I really believe this," he writes, "then I should
regard my having been morally forced into this work as
a high election of God. And certainly I cannot but
believe that He has given me special gifts of strength
on the late occasion, especially in Scotland. Three
things I would ask of God over and above all the bounty
which surrounds me. This first, that I may escape into
retirement. This second, that I may speedily be
enabled to divest myself of everything resembling wealth.
And the third if I may that when God calls me He
may call me speedily."

There was to be given him another great decade of
life, a struggle against doubt, cowardice, and the
accumulated wrongs of time, which in its large energies
and enthusiasms already seems the record of some
combat of giants in a half fabulous past. And at the
end there was given him also that gift which he had
desired so eagerly and so patiently, the interval of tran-
quillity and preparation "between Parliament and the
grave."

Two sentences adequately sum up the inner life of
Gladstone. The objective result is recorded in the
magnificent phrase addressed to him by an unknown
correspondent : " You have so lived and wrought as to
have kept the soul alive in England." The inner
springs of action are revealed in the line from the 3rd
Canto of the Paradiso, which he accepted as possessing
an " inexpressible majesty of truth " as if spoken by
the very mouth of God : " In la sua volontade e nostra
pace": In His Will is our Peace. To the obedience

113 I

DE MORTUIS

of that Will he dedicated all the ardour of a soul beyond
all men's impetuous and impatient. " The final state
which we are to contemplate with hope and seek by
discipline," he wrote, " is that in which we shall be one
with the will of God."

The effort demanded a continual examination and
struggle. He " achieved self-control," is the testimony
of his wife, " by incessant watching and prayer." In
all the Christian centuries no more splendid gifts
have been offered with whole-hearted devotion and
humility. The age has travelled beyond the special
intellectual affirmations of Gladstone's belief. His
principles were matured before the theory of evolution
and modern research had created a new world. But
the great ends and ideals of the passion of his soul,
the " bright crystal laws of life," in Mr. Morley's fine
phrase, " endure like pointing stars guiding a traveller's
eye to the celestial pole by which he steers." A large
benefaction remains to us and succeeding generations
from so shining an example. He raised above the
turmoil of the politics of a day a supreme moral ideal.
He reconciled the large claims of a Catholic faith with
the assertion of liberty as an essential condition of
excellence in human things. He maintained always
against the slow stain of the world's contagion the
detachment and ardour of an inner life fixed in entire
submission to the will of God. High efforts such as
these are as essential to-day as in that vanished universe
of Gladstone's first radiant dawn. To those amongst
whom, in however limited a sphere, is offered a possibility
of a similar enterprise, his life stands secure in the
courses of Time ; a challenge to all striving after transi-
tory things, a message of victory in the troublous years
to come.

114

TEE CHURCH MILITANT
TEMPLE WESTCOTT CBEIGHTON DOLLING

THE ecclesiastical life is never a very cheering docu-
ment. The atmosphere is often thin and rarefied,
the interests divorced from the varied experience of the
common thought of men. In so many success has meant
the cautious pursuit of a well-trodden way. Who now
remembers the name of the Archbishop of Canterbury of
a hundred years ago or the penultimate Dean of Lich-
field or Archdeacon of London ? But where personality
and strength are conspicuously present, the life of the
priest or minister acquires an especial interest. Always
there is the challenge, was it for that reason or for this,
that he forsook the combats of the world and entered
the service of a spiritual kingdom ? And of late years
interest has been intensified by the general break-up of
the traditional theology. There are many to-day who
are astonished that an honest man can still call himself
a Christian, or assent to formularies historic and out-
worn. There are others perplexed to reconcile the
Christian ethic with the modern economic organisation
of society, and scorn God because the cry of the poor
exercises so scanty a disturbance amid the apathy of the
Sabbath congregation. The past few years have been
heavy in the loss of those to whom these and other

115

DE MORTUIS

questions were very pressing. Their lives are an
attempt at answers. Temple was one of the strong
men of the century. Creighton was the most agile
and interested mind of his day. Westcott as a scholar
and a thinker stands heyond the reach of challenge.
Dolling was a personality who exercised a particular in-
fluence and attraction. The lives of these men should
be fruitful in questions, if not in answers, to this problem
of faith disturbed and uncertain guidance which broods
over the future of England.

" We cannot understand how these opinions can
be held consistently with an honest subscription to
the formularies of our Church, with many of the funda-
mental doctrines of which they appear to us essentially
at variance." So forty-two years ago, in scathing con-
demnation, two archbishops and twenty-five bishops
publicly denounced seven writers who had united to
issue a little volume of theological essays. Nine years
afterwards the first of these writers was appointed by
Gladstone Bishop of Exeter. A vast hubbub arose.
Petitions poured in from Protestants and Ritualists,
joining against the common enemy. The Chapter were
urged to refuse to confirm the election. " I have letters
from all parts of the country," said the Dean of Exeter,
" about the sword of the Lord and Gideon, exhorting us
to go to prison and promising us visits there." On the
day of consecration bishop after bishop protested ; one
(still living) " in the fear of God and the Church " ;
others counselling delay or wringing their hands in
despair. Time ultimately swept the clamour into
silence. Thirty years after, this man who had been

116

THE CHURCH MILITANT

judged by his Church's leaders as dishonest, died one
winter day amidst a universal tribute to a rugged
honesty Frederick, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury.

Few lives have been able to show so dramatic a
revolution. Those who would understand the real
nature of the man can be recommended to study the
record of the long dead controversy over "Essays and
Reviews." Entombed in the dusty immensity of Arch-
bishop Tait's life is a chapter of Tait-Temple letters
which for vigour and interest in ecclesiastical corre-
spondence can only be paralleled by the Newman-
Manning letters in Purcell's first edition. Tait, after
promising to protect the writers, had yielded to the
agitation and signed that scathing document of condem-
nation. Later he attempted to persuade Temple to
desert the other essayists and leave them to their ruin.
The replies ring true and tempered across the interven-
ing years. It is strength against suavity. Here is the
restrained, passionate protest of a man who feels himself
wronged by the weakness and uncertainty of a friend
cowering before a storm of public opinion. " If you do
not wish to alienate your friends, do not treat them as
you have treated me." " Nothing on earth will induce
me to do what you propose. I do not judge for others,
but in me it would be base and untrue." " You ought
not to make it impossible for a friend to calculate on
what you will do." " The greatest kindness you can
now do me is to forget till all this is over that any
friendship ever existed between us." " Your friends
complain that they cannot count on you. Your enemies
say they can." The sentences sear and burn after all
the lapse of time. Not often do high dignitaries who
attempt compromise thus learn the truth. The man is
revealed in a moment of time. He is true as steel,

117

DE MORTUIS

honest as the day, with deep affection beneath the
outward harshness. He scornfully refuses to exculpate
himself at the expense of his comrades. He regards as,
perhaps, the meanest act of which a public man could
be guilty, the sacrifice of a cause or a friend to such an
aimless, despicable thing as the clamour of the crowd.

These were the heroic days of Liberalism. This
little book and these seven denounced men become the
centre and rallying cry of the movement. Temple had
not always been of this faith. At Oxford, with almost
all others of his generation, he had been influenced by
the Catholic revival. I once heard him describe the
fascination exercised over the University by Newman
from St. Mary's pulpit, with a voice, as he pictured it,
like a silver bell; a pleading for righteousness and
the judgment of God with the piercing simplicity of a
child. In the break-up which followed he threw himself
with energy into the liberal movement. The position of
the "Essays and Reviews" has now become an accepted
commonplace in the Church. As in the history of the
dreaded five-point Charter in politics, men now only
wonder at the consternation evoked by so mild a pro-
gramme. But the spirit of these writers in religion as in
politics is as necessary to-day as yesterday. The prin-
ciple which underlay the definite position, the right of
free inquiry, the acceptance of knowledge, indifference to
accusations of dishonesty and the hostility of all that
is comfortable and orthodox, were never more needed
than now. From the grave the words of the great
Archbishop come with a message of encouragement.
" I joined in writing this book in the hope of breaking
through that mischievous reticence which, go where I
would, I perpetually found destroying the truthfulness
of religion. I wished to encourage men to speak

118

THE CHURCH MILITANT

out." The study of theology and criticism, " BO full
of difficulties, imperatively demands freedom for its
conditions. To tell a man to study, and yet bid him,
under heavy penalties, come to the same conclusions
with those who have have not studied, is to mock
him. If the conclusions are prescribed the study is
precluded."

And if his first legacy to modern Liberalism is a
lesson of honesty and of progress, his second, no less
needful, is a lesson of work. He was neither a great
thinker, nor a great scholar, nor a great orator. He
was in many respects typically English ; practical, not
visionary, hating humbug and cant, sturdily pursuing
his own business. There was work to do, and he set
himself to do it. Plodding forward, shifting aside the
faint and laggard, trampling down anything that opposed
his progress, he drove along the machine : with creak-
ing and protest, rusty joints and unoiled hinges : but
still ever moving. A worker, he tested others by their
work. Not Carlyle himself enforced more emphatically
the Gospel of Labour. This was the key to all his
ecclesiastical policy so little understood, so much
debated. For millinery and sham he had no respect
whatever. He disliked ritual, and where he found it
hollow and lifeless, he ruthlessly condemned. Amidst
endless apocryphal stories two may be accepted as
authentic. He always, to the regret of High Church-
men, celebrated at the North side of the altar. At
one advanced church at which he was to officiate the
ingenious authorities had determined to force him to
assume the Eastward position. The Bishop found the
sides of the altar elaborately barricaded with flowers
and greenery. At the proper moment, however, with-
out any apparent emotion, he sturdily tramped through

119

DE MORTUIS

the palms and lilies, and standing amidst the flower-
pots, to the astonishment of the congregation, concluded
the ceremony with calmness. On another, in one of
the dead " Catholic " churches of the West End, he
entered at the tail of a long procession marching
towards the brilliantly lighted altar. The procession
entered the chancel, but without the Bishop. In the
hush of surprise a stentorian command resounded from
the end of the nave, " Put out those lights." These
being hastily extinguished, the Bishop tramped his
solitary way up the awestruck church. The vicar
afterwards attempted remonstrance. " But at St.

A s, my lord (naming a church in a poor district),

you allowed altar-lights." " They've got the kernel as
well as the husk," was the discomforting response.

Yet, despite this habitual attitude, under his rule
such developments of ritual were permitted as London
had never before seen. So long as work was progressing
in the old language, BO long as souls were being
saved he tolerated the widest divergence in non-
essentials. In London's great welter of heathenism
and crime he refused to persecute those whose fruits,
however grown, were visibly good. Ritual seemed to
him so unimportant, five or five hundred candles,
marchings round the church, quaint or picturesque
clothing. He would have permitted a procession to
enter on their heads if it would have aided the great
cause. The result of this toleration was a Church
crisis, Mr. Kensit, Lady \Vimborne, and a Protestant
agitation which disturbed his successors but troubled
him not at all. That a man should be in the least
moved by popular clamour, or yield to a cause through
the noise of its adherents, seemed to him not so much
cowardly as absurd.

120

THE CHURCH MILITANT

To the last he remained strong in the principles for
which he had fought with Gladstone in the old days.
Yet he grew profoundly dissatisfied with the condition
of English politics. A few months before his death,
when we were discussing present-day questions, he
suddenly burst in upon us with the conundrum : " But
if you could call any living statesman to power, whom
would you name ? " The answer was impossible.
Yet he always refused to attempt to read the future.
In a collection of fatuous forecasts of well-known men,
" What will the world be like at the end of the
century?" his answer stands terse and characteristic:
" I haven't the slightest idea." I remember an evening
when we deliberately attempted to draw from him
prophecies of the results of present-day movements.
"I don't know," was his invariable reply. He had
done his work. He belonged to a vanishing age. He
knew his time was short, that a new England had
arisen which must find its own leaders and work out
its own salvation.

With others, however, he noted the transference of
interest from political to economic questions. To the
end he was a strenuous advocate of social reform. Two
years before he died he unexpectedly appeared at the
Brighton Church Congress in a lethargic discussion
on the Housing Question, selecting this, as he said,
from all the subjects, that he might emphasise the
necessity for its consideration by the Church. It is no
secret to state that he was no whole-hearted advocate
of the Government's Education policy. The Bill as it
stood was fashioned by other hands. Though giving
a general assent he regarded it with misgiving. He had
not the contempt for " undenominationalism " which is
now fashionable. But he recognised the impossibility

121

DE MORTUIS

of the present " religious " teaching in State schools.
"It may not be important," I heard him say a few
weeks before he died, " whether that or this dogma is
taught to children ; but it is important that whatever
religion is taught should be believed by the teacher."

" Some of those whom the gods love die young.
This man, because the gods loved him, lingered on to
be of immense, patriarchal age, till the sweetness it
had taken so long to secrete in him was found at last."
Pater's verdict on Michaelangelo naturally rises to
the mind in thinking of Temple's last days. To those
who only knew him at the close of his long career
the popular verdict of harshness seemed incredible.
Strength, simplicity, kindliness these were the pre-
vailing impressions. In the vastness of Lambeth
Palace he encamped as a temporary occupant and on
a journey. Here were the simple iron bedstead, the
bare equipment for work, simple furnishing, simple
meals, in which one was encouraged to consume barley
water a deplorable drink. Messengers poured in and
out, an enormous correspondence flooded to the four
quarters of the earth. Around him surged armies of
courtiers and flatterers. In the midst was the simple,
family life, with, at the centre, the old warrior, with
eye dim but force unabated, having borne unscathed
through a strange and disordered time the heart of a
little child.

The end found him still at work. A month before it
came he was fulfilling his crowded round of engagements,
doing the work of ten with an iron constitution which
apparently nothing could disturb rushing over England
in long night journeys, preaching, writing, advising, driv-
ing forward the machine. Suddenly, and in a moment,
the overwrought body collapsed ; he left the House of

122

THE CHURCH MILITANT

Lords a dying man. Slowly, continuously, painlessly
the life ebbed away. With tranquillity and a certain
blitheness he waited for the end; leaving his work
accomplished, carefully taking his farewell of all,
apologising in historic words for being such an uncon-
scionable long time a-dying. I like to think of him as
seen in the evening service in Lambeth Chapel amidst
the memorials of innumerable transitory generations, in
the broken lights and shadows, a strong and heroic figure
reciting with unfaltering accents the creed of that
faith which had sustained him for eighty years. An
elemental force vanished with him, a great personality.
Requiem eternam dona ei Domine : et lux perpetua
luceat ei.

n

Westcott's life is the revelation of a character
rather than a record of ecclesiastical history. Out-
wardly there is the career of usefulness : a fellow-
ship at Trinity, a mastership at Harrow, canonries at
Peterborough and Westminster, a Cambridge professor-
ship ; finally, the great Durham bishopric. But a
similar course has been followed by many energetic and
mediocre persons now reposing in unremembered graves.
Behind all this, which in Westcott's case was accidental,
is the life of thought in which he really lived. Like
his comrade Hort in his country parsonage this man in
the main was concerned with the things of the spirit.

It was a life of almost incredible toil combined with
an ascetic simplicity. As an undergraduate, we hear of
work from five in the morning until past twelve at night,
with scanty intervals for meals and recreation, and a
biscuit for lunch. Later, " when we came down to
prayers in the morning," says his son, "we would

123

DE MORTUIS

find him writing away with a pile of finished letters
before him, and when we went to bed he was working
still." At Harrow he stood for extreme simplicity of
living and a plea for the disciplined life. Here he
elaborated the idea of the " Coenobium," a kind of
community of families committed to three ends the
conquest of luxury, the disciplining of intellectual
labour, religious exercises. The scheme was character-
istic both of the splendour of the ideal and the inability
to appreciate the littleness and vanities which make such
an ideal impossible. " Whenever we children showed
signs of greediness," says his son, " we were assured
that such things would be unheard of in the Coenobium.
We viewed the establishment of the Coenobium with
gloomy apprehension." Even Harrow was unable to
fasten upon him the usual intellectual sterility of the
public-school mastership. Volumes of books on Chris-
tian philosophy and textual criticism were being issued
all the seventeen years. This devoted intellectual
labour was associated with a complete indifference to
most things which men delight in. Every form of
luxury was to him abhorrent. " When circumstances
compelled him so to do, he practically went without a
meal." He had an extreme disinclination to spend
money on himself. " He would insist on pronouncing
threadbare and green coats, condemned by the universal
voice of the family, as ' excellent.' ' In the enforced
display of the bishopric he would sit huddled up with
his back to the horses in his carriage, as a kind of mute
protest against such outrageous luxury. The sense of
life's intense seriousness was ever with him. "Holi-
days he could hardly take : he found no joy in them,
and more especially so in later years. Expenditure on
self was all but impossible."

124

THE CHURCH MILITANT

The result of this ascetic toil was the accumulation
of vast knowledge in varied fields. He was a scholar,
in the exact sense, of European reputation. But with
this detailed, textual research, which came to be the
distinguishing feature of the Cambridge school of
theology, he combined a wide acquaintance with other
forms of science. He had dabbled in geology and
botany, and was familiar with all those scientific
discoveries which were filling the age in which he lived
with noisy echoes. He had read deep in philosophy,
ancient and modern. Comte, Browning, Baur, Mazzini,
were the modern writers to whom he owed most. In
the last years of life he commenced with all the ardour
of youth the study of those social questions which he
held were the real problems of the coming time. The
novel was the only form of literature with which he was
unfamiliar. " The Scarlet Letter," " Jane Eyre,"
" Villette," " Romola," " John Inglesant," this is the
pathetic list of his library. His strange failures in
reading men, the atmosphere of detachment which
made so much of his work difficult for the man of the
street, may be due to the dwelling in a universe of
ideas alien to the world of modern fiction.

His name will always be associated with two main
efforts : the elucidation of a text and the preaching of a
philosophy. On the one side he is linked with Light-
foot and Hort in that critical and constructive examina-
tion of the New Testament canon which was the special
work of the Cambridge school. The Westcott and
Hort text, an epoch-making book, "probably the most
important contribution to Biblical learning in our
generation "; the great commentaries on St. John and
the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Revised Version of
the Bible, are the permanent memorials of his life-

125

DE MORTUIS

work. On the other side, he stands by himself, rather
pathetically alone. He elaborated a Christian philosophy
which the student found mystical and the ordinary man
perplexing. It was alien to the prevailing theology of
the Oxford Movement, hard, clear-cut, dogmatic. It
found no acceptance among the Evangelicals, with their
demands for emotional satisfaction in a simple creed.
It was distrusted by the new Broad Church divines,
cheerfully iconoclastic and hating mystery. Occasion-
ally the reader caught an illuminating sentence.
Gleams of a splendour never felt before would dis-
close abysses of spiritual meaning behind the terms
of a dead dogma. To a few, this teaching invested
all things with a light that never was on sea or
land. But, for the most part, there he walked alone.
In the early days he had passed through a period of
terrible doubt. He speaks of a wild storm of unbelief
" from the midst of which he gazed on the hundreds who
conform with a kind of awe and doubt a mixture of won-
der and suspicion." He emerged on to the height with
a clear apprehension of spiritual things. All his later
years he seemed to possess a spiritual vision, to walk
amongst his companions in the cave with something of
the bewilderment of those who had seen the light in
Plato's allegory. One of his best-known works was at
first suppressed, owing to the demand for modification
made by the Society for the Propagation of Christian
Knowledge. In the period of his first writings the
orthodox were profoundly perplexed by his utterances.
It is difficult to summarise his teaching. It has
been said that Westcott shifted the central fact of
Christianity from the Atonement to the Incarnation.
The vision of a humanity burdened with its sins and
haunted by terrors of judgment became changed to the

126

THE CHURCH MILITANT

vision of a humanity inspired by hope and waiting
expectant for a glory that shall be revealed. The con-
cluding lines of Browning's " Karshish " sum up
Westcott's creed. " The Bishop does not seem to
believe in the Fall," it was complained of him. He
scarcely realised the depth of degradation to which
human nature could descend. When confronted with
some particularly appalling case of clerical immorality
he would frankly reject the overwhelming evidence
adduced, upon the ground that his categories of being
did not include the existence of such a monster.
"Humanity," he was never tired of asserting, is "not
a splendid shrine deserted by a great king, but a living
body stirred by noble thoughts which cannot for ever be
in vain."

This consciousness of the supreme greatness of
humanity made him one of the prophets of his genera-
tion. In the Incarnation he found the key to all
that social enthusiasm for which he is best remembered.
"A critic asks me," he sadly complains at the end,
" 'what has the Incarnation to do with war . . . with
the organisation of industry, with buying and selling
with expenditure ? ' That such questions can be asked
by a man of average intelligence is a terrible proof of
our failure to make our message known." Religion
must come from the twilight of the Churches, he was
always insisting, and into the ways of men. So he
preached Christian Socialism, and became founder
and first President of the Christian Social Union,
perplexing the orthodox and respectable with the sight
of a bishop concerning himself with trade unions and an
eight hours' day. He exhibited the rare combination,
of the mystic with the practical man. The most spiritual
of modern religious teachers descended most com-

127

pletely into concern with the petty questions of the
day.

Some very pleasing pictures remain of scenes in
Westcott's long and devoted life. There is the most
touching combat in self-effacement between him and
Lightfoot, each refusing to put himself as a candidate
for the professorship before the other. There are the
two sermons in Westminster Abbey preached by the
solitary sorrower of the "triumvirate" over the grave
of his lifelong friends. There is one aspect of the man
in the somewhat eerie meditations in the great
cathedral at midnight, spent in thought and prayer and
communion with the dead ; a silent figure in the moon-
light, "when the vast building was haunted with
strange lights and shadows, and the ticking of the great
clock sounded like some giant's footsteps in the deep
silence."

In sharp contrast, but all of a piece, is the dramatic
scene at Auckland Castle, when the great coal strike,
which had desolated a thousand homes, was settled
by the personal pleading of the bishop. He invited
the masters and men to the castle, presided at a
ioint conference, speaking earnestly for peace : then
left them in separate rooms, himself acting as in-
termediary. The long hours passed, and no settle-
ment arrived : the crowd which had gathered in the
town pressed up to the palace, waiting with painful
tension for any news. All the North was hanging on
the result. He pleaded with the owners for concession,
urging them to put aside all the aroused bitterness, to
consider the question as it would be judged in the years to
come. Finally, the force of sheer goodness prevailed : the
owners consented to the compromise : the rest was a wild
scene of rejoicing and gratitude in a thousand homes.

128

THE CHURCH MILITANT

Effort, devotion, utter humility, shine through all.
"If I had ever dared to form a wish," he writes con-
cerning one offer. " Here I have learnt to feel my own
deficiencies most keenly," he confesses to another,
" and I have found, too, those who are willing and able
to teach and to train me." With all this humility and
kindness there is no essential weakness. He warned
as well as encouraged. His occasional outbursts of
wrath, as in the correspondence concerning the action
of the bishops about the Revisers' Communion, are
almost terrible in their intensity.

He saw and rebuked the vices of his age as well as
its greatness. Many of his words were of doubt and
warning. Here was no soft and easy gospel to be
accepted by a nation living on the energies of the past
and noisily proclaiming itself immortal. "Will the
future say," he asked of this generation, "that crumb-
ling heap, that desolate iron surface, tells of work
performed only for the moment, which has cumbered the
earth with ruins ; those coarse and mean phrases which
have corrupted our language, tell of men who had no
reverence and no dignity; that class antagonism which
torments us, tells of the selfishness of our fathers, who,
when there was yet time, failed to bind men to men as
fellow-labourers in the cause of God? "

Assuredly never was such warning more needed than
in the time when the voice has become silent.

The keynote of this long life of single purpose is
gummed up in one of his great sentences, " To make of
life one harmonious whole, to realise the invisible, to
anticipate the transfiguring majesty of the Divine
Presence, is all that is worth living for." To the end
his unclouded optimism never failed him. He lived on
the height. Something of the glory seemed to have

129 K

DE MORTUIS

descended on him as, with rapt face and eyes which saw
things hidden from the crowd around, he proclaimed
the reality of an unseen world or the coming of the
universal restoration. He lived in constant communion
with spiritual powers. In the cathedral or his own
chapel at night the dead seemed very near him. Those
who have heard him proclaim his gospel will long
remember how the little shrunken figure became trans-
formed, and the almost painful humility vanished, and
the voice took a sudden note of power, when, oblivious
to the presence of the listening crowd, he proclaimed
the spiritual message which he found almost too great
for human utterance. Preceded by all his old com-
rades, leaving the memory of a great example, with-
out fear, but with all his own humility and confession
of sinfulness, he passed triumphant to his rest.

m

The life of Creighton presents a threefold interest.
The first is the impression of the thought and change
of a stirring time as reflected in the mind of a man
of receptive and catholic sympathies. The second
is the spectacle not only of history making, but of his-
tory being made, by one called to play a great part in
the world's affairs. The third is the actual study of
one of the most fascinating (in a sense one of the most
baffling) of the great men of the later Victorian age,
who would have been almost equally a subject of
interest had he been Bishop of Mesopotamia or
Valparaiso.

Mandell Creighton was the son of a joiner of Carlisle,
who had made a runaway match at Gretna Green with

130

THE CHURCH MILITANT

a kind-hearted woman, "very quick with her tongue."
Childhood "over the shop in Castle Street " was stern,
hard, rather joyless. He passed to Durham, then to
Oxford ; a hrilliant career culminating in a Fellowship
at Merton. The age was an age of wide disbelief, when
all sane and clever men at Oxford were supposed to
have abandoned Christianity. Creighton was chiefly
renowned as a man who smoked multitudinous cigarettes
and read multitudinous French novels, and in conversa-
tion held pre-eminent place for the audacity of his
paradoxes. His ordination was " much commented on."
He himself acknowledged " that it was the habit in
Oxford to assume that a man who took orders must be
either a fool or a knave, and that as people could not
call him a fool they had concluded that he must be a
knave." " He never wore his spiritual heart on his
sleeve," is the judgment which would apply to all his
life, " and for this reason many thought he had none to
wear."

Then, too, as always, he never suffered fools gladly,
and held a hearty contempt for the majority of his
fellow-men. " We are told that all men are liars,"
remonstrates a friend, " we are nowhere told that all
men are fools." " The strongest compound of grimness
and tenderness that I ever saw or conceived," is a
description.

" Dull and solemn people," writes a contemporary,
" thought him flippant ; shallow people thought him
insincere. No man of his time was so constantly, so
freely, and so variously canvassed, not always favourably,
but invariably as a rare and strange portent, not to be
readily classified in any familiar category of human
nature. I remember that once, on a tour in Holland with
two friends, we talked of him daily and never exhausted

131

DE MORTUIS

the subject ; and years afterwards I was told that it had
become so much the custom to discuss him at the
shooting-lodge of one of his friends in Scotland, that
some one proposed in fun to levy a fine on any one who
mentioned his name."

From the early time he showed his entire concern in
the practical life, in the historical method of approach-
ing questions. Of Darwin's discovery, " the whole
matter seems to me to be very ingenious and amusing,"
he writes airily ; " but I have not time for it, and would
rather read some Italian history."

After his marriage he vanished from Oxford into a
Northumbrian village, and was Vicar of Embleton for
nine years years of devoted work and incessant study
of which the "History of the Papacy" was the main
fruit. From thence he was called to the new Dixie
Professorship at Cambridge, where he astonished the
dull by his " frivolity." " Nowhere did he talk such
nonsense as in our Combination Room on Sundays,"
was the admiring verdict of a friend.

After a canonry at Worcester, combined with his
professorship, and a momentary exchange to Windsor,
he was suddenly promoted to succeed Magee as Bishop
of Peterborough. He had absolutely no wish for office.
" My mind will go to seed," was his characteristic
verdict. " I shall utter nothing but platitudes for the
rest of my life, and everybody will write letters in the
newspapers about my iniquities." The latter judgment
was as completely fulfilled as the former falsified. His
work at Peterborough first revealed to the general world
same of his astonishing powers, and there was a universal
approval when the call brought him to London.

His five years in London, in five of the most crowded
and momentous years of the century, stamped them-

132

THE CHURCH MILITANT

selves deep upon the history of the time. He always
resented the time spent in curbing human folly. " Every
ass in the diocese thinks that he has a right to come and
bray in my study," was one characteristic complaint.

London he branded as "this inhuman spot." " The
world which he defined as ' the activities of this life
with God left out ' seemed to him to invade everything
in London." He found himself in the toils of inter-
minable ritual disputes. He despised both parties
the one for their foolishness, the other for their
bigotry and reliance on the secular arm ; and scarcely
took the trouble to conceal his contempt. His letters
abound in firm common-sense which neither party found
acceptable which, indeed, he did not expect either
party to find acceptable. " We are all agreed in
regretting that there should be such a person as Mr.
Kensit," he wrote to one party ; "but the question how
best to deal with him is a purely practical one."
" There is no reason why your method should not be
tried," he wrote to Sir William Harcourt on the other
side, " except that no one wishes to try it, but only to
abuse the bishops for not trying it."

His activity was astonishing. He went everywhere
and did everything generally two things at once. His
sayings afforded unfailing copy for the journalists
whom he so heartily despised. " I seem to be always
talking," is his complaint. Men wondered when the
Bishop of London found time to say his prayers.

It killed him in five years. At the end " he did not
seem as if he wished to live." He passed away with
" God " on his lips.

" For sheer cleverness Creighton beats any man I
know " was Archbishop Temple's judgment. " The
most alert and universal intelligence that existed in this

133

DE MORTUIS

island at the time of his death " was the verdict of
Lord Rosebery.

All his life he remained aloof from contemporary
politics, hut his judgments are full of wisdom. In 1880
he definitely came out on the platform to support the
Liberals against Disraeli's Imperialism, demanding that
" we might go back from assertions of our ascendency
to the duties which we met with at home." Later he
is appalled at " the mess " the Liberals are making of
it, and prophesies " a Conservative reaction that will
last our lifetime." In 1881, with an almost uncanny
foresight, he can foretell the future:

" England is not healthy ; she is going through a
process of economical readjustment of which no one can
see the end ; it may result in the development of new
forces, or it may be the beginning of a quiet decay not
decay exactly, but subsidence. All this sorely exercises
the mind of the spectator and fills him with wonder.
Trade and agriculture cannot any longer go on
the old lines; will they find new lines or will they
collapse ? Already I see the doctrine of Protection
taking a strong hold of the mind of separate classes.
I believe that separate interests will coalesce against
the public good and against the voice of wisdom. This,
by bringing in a fallacious solution, will suspend the
real settlement of the question and make a mess."

He distrusted Gladstone because of his enthusiasms
and emotions. All his life he was an enemy of emotion
and enthusiasm in public affairs. " Imperial policy will
drive home affairs into a corner" was a verdict in 1885.
He became a Unionist at the great disruption. In the
Armenian agitation he branded the movement as " hope-
lessly Pecksniffian," because it refused the only practical
step, " to hand the whole thing over to Russia." In the

134

THE CHURCH MILITANT

South African trouble he condemned (as so many) the
Chamberlain policy, but accepted the war when it
broke out. "I don't like war with the Transvaal," he
wrote just before the crisis. " It may be a short cut to
great schemes, but we are great enough to wait." At
the end he took a gloomy view of the future :

" We are ignorant and refuse to learn. We are
arrogant and refuse to sympathise. We believe in
our general capacity : we rejoice in our national wealth.
I think that in a few years our wealth will diminish in
comparison with that of the United States : our com-
merce will be threatened by German competition,
founded on better education and receptive intelligence.
We must urge these considerations and must not
settle down, to live in a fool's paradise. I feel that
the next ten years will be a very critical period for
England."

He was the frankest and most natural person of the
time. Whatever he thought he immediately spoke out
or wrote down in his letters. The results were often
disastrous. " If one stops to be judicious or wise or
discreet," was his apology, " one simply becomes dull."
He was undoubtedly "too clever": in many respects
a kind of ecclesiastical Bernard Shaw ; producing the
same devastating effect on the plain man. He had no
self-restraint, and to the end remained as one of those
children whose company he most loved. He was
inclined to treat all men, especially enthusiasts, as
children; and the difficulties of the Ritual agitation
were greatly increased by his inability to convince the
violent partisans that he did not think them children
quarrelling over toys and playthings. He hated all
enthusiasm, all fanaticism. I remember hearing him
preach a University sermon at Cambridge a sermon

135

DE MORTUIS

on "Liberty," in many respects remarkable. He
stalked into the pulpit, unrolled a conspicuous manu-
script, read hurriedly in a passionless voice without ever
lifting his eyes from the paper, and without a sign of
emotion stalked out again at the end. It was impossible
to imagine anything more chilling. Later, as chairman
of the London Diocesan Conference, he sat at a table on
the dais writing interminable letters with an aspect of
cold detachment, while rival factions howled at each
other in the hall beneath. At the end he rose and
dismissed the whole thing (so it seemed) with a few
words of frigid contempt. He would go down to
some suburb to bless the local hassock, and the Mayor
and chief citizens and clergy would be gathered
together, bursting with enthusiasm ; and he would rap
out some statement as that "this kind of thing bores
me to death," or that " the horrible thought has just
struck me that I shall be doing this sort of thing ten
years hence " ; and the fervour would somehow vanish
from the ceremony.

" Bored " and " amused," as the greatest evil and
the greatest good in life, run through his judgment. His
view of his fellow-men, and especially of Englishmen,
was of the lowest. " Sometimes it seems to me as if
the world was made up of moral invalids and moral
lunatics," was one verdict. The " heart of the English
people " he described as " the very last place I should
wish to be found in a sloppy sort of place, I take it."
Of history, "I know that we ought to believe," he wrote,
' ' that mighty movements always swayed the hearts of
men. So they have when they made for their pecuniary
interest. But I believe that ideas were always second
thoughts in politics they were the garb with which
men covered the nudity of their practical desires. I

136

THE CHURCH MILITANT

mean that I can never ask myself first, ' What
mighty ideas swelled in the hearts of men ? ' But,
' What made men see a chance of saving sixpence, of
gaining sixpence, or escaping from being robbed of
sixpence ? ' What man was clever enough to devise a
formula round which men could rally for this purpose? "
" The English mind has no grasp of ideas," he declared,
" and no sense of proportion. Indeed, the English-
man has no mind at all ; he only has an hereditary
obstinacy."

He heartily despised our English education, from the
elementary school upwards. He branded the nation as
a whole as in that dangerous condition of "half-
knowledge " which was more dangerous than ignorance.
He exhibited no sympathy at all with the newer ideals
of social reform, and seemed to care nothing for the
problems of London's poverty. His real enthusiasms
were reserved for knowledge, for liberty, and for that
Church of England which he called " the nation looked
at from the religious side," whose sober and unemotional
piety seemed to him the type of all that is best amongst
the religions of the world.

He was a wayward, always interesting, lovable
character. He hated getting up in the morning. He
hated the high mountains, "the rubbish heaps of
Nature's workshops." He was passionately fond of
children, who were entirely devoted to him. This love
of children he never discovered till he was nearly thirty :
more fortunate than Herbert Spencer, who pathetically
realised the attraction of children's society only when
an old man.

" Probably no one," writes Mrs. Creighton, "was ever a
better hand at a romp than he was. He would toss the
children about like balls, and allow them to ill-treat him

137

DE MORTUIS

in any way they liked. He was also an adept at telling
nonsense stories ; sometimes on a walk with the children
hanging round him, each struggling to get as close as
possible, and their elders also trying to keep near enough
to listen ; or lying full length on the hearthrug before
the fire with all the children sitting upon him, making
what he called a ' regular pie.' He seemed to enjoy
his own inventions fully as much as his hearers, as he
spun them out of his brain without a moment's pause."

At Sandringham, just after being appointed to the
Bishopric of London, " yesterday afternoon," he wrote,
" I was careering round the hall with the Duke of York's
eldest son on my shoulder, and Lord Salisbury looking
at my agility with amazement." A pretty story is told
of an incident of Queen Victoria's last visit to London.
Standing with his chaplain in the crowd, to see her
pass, the Bishop noticed a child who was too small
to be able to see ; so he gave his chaplain his hat
to hold, and lifted the child to a safe seat on his
shoulder whence it could see everything.

Beneath all the cleverness and scornful judgment of
men the brilliancy and glitter and capacity which
astonished so many was the inner life of affection
and devotion. I remember being surprised by the
sudden depth of feeling displayed in one of the last of
his sermons a Lent address to a small audience upon
the words " Incorruptible and undefiled and that fadeth
not away." The purpose of life, his deliberate verdict,
was " an opportunity for loving." " The longer I live,"
he wrote in those last years, " the more deeply I am
convinced that the true and abiding qualities are not
the intellectual qualities, but the qualities of absolute
simplicity and straightforwardness, and the desire for
the right."

138

THE CHURCH MILITANT

"To me the one supreme object of human life," he
confessed in a rare revelation of himself, " is, and
always has been, to grow nearer to God; and I regard
my own individual life as simply an opportunity of
offering myself to Him."

IV

The main outline of Dolling's life is known to
all. Here was a combination of diverse elements
which caught the imaginations of men, and gave him
a supreme interest amongst ministers of religion to the
lay mind. Humanity in its larger aspects, naturalness,
simplicity, a love of life and of all the varied men and
women in the world, especially the sinners, the poor,
and those outside the pale of the Church ; these were
some outstanding features of a life of single-hearted
devotion to one high cause. He never felt at home until
he escaped from the atmosphere of the theological
college and the dull respectabilities of conventional
society, and settled down in his Portsmouth slum, among
the people whom he loved. There was always much
wilfulness in him. The element of revolt was never
far from the surface. The " dear street-corner out-of-
work people," as he calls them, were always more con-
gruous to him than the ordinary well-to-do ratepayer.
Brought up in the old evangelical tradition, his was a
mind naturally catholic, delighting in symbol and cere-
monial expression and the light and colour of service
and procession. He had little reverence for the past,
and about minute points of ritual he cared not at all.
But the possibility of the magnificence of church and
ceremony in the midst of the huddled, squalid dwellings
of the poor made to him an irresistible appeal. His

139

DE MORTUIS

artistic sense was limited. Elaborate music he always
hated, and the asthetic Catholicism which combined
contempt of the common people with the sensuous
appeal of " Cathedral " service, he regarded as an
enemy of mankind. But the Catholic discipline he
frankly accepted. He held that irreparable wrong had
been done to these common people by the practical
neglect of the Sacraments for so many centuries. And
he recognised that the dreary condition of minds vacant
and dulled with an entirely material outlook and little
power of resistance to the forces of evil the condition
in which he found great masses of the neglected poor
could only be broken up and restored to a living faith
by the full inheritance of Sacramental worship.

The years at St. Agatha's were the great years of his
life. The later period was more fruitful in lessons for
the time. From the astonishing success of his Ports-
mouth parish, with the enthusiasm of all classes of the
town for a vigorous social reformer, and the utter
devotion of his own poor people, he passed, after a
year of wandering, into the grey, dead atmosphere of
East London. The earlier successes could not be
repeated in such a dreary environment. " Keligion
has, so to speak," he confessed, "gone to pieces; there
is no opposition ; we do not care enough to oppose.
God is not in any of our thoughts ; we do not even fear
Him. We face death with perfect composure, for we
have nothing to give up and nothing to look forward to.
Heaven has no attraction, because we should be out of
place there. And Hell has no terrors."

The conviction of the utter wrongness of such a
condition of lassitude and of the disloyalty of a Church
which allowed, without protest, the continuance and
propagation of conditions creating this dreadful ac-

140

THE CHURCH MILITANT

quiescence, drove him in the last few years of his life
to assume the function of a prophet. There is, perhaps,
something a little incongruous in the idea of this
exuberant, happy, rollicking Irishman, who retained
through the whole of his life the heart of a child, thus
warning grave and learned dignitaries of the menace
of the time. But, indeed, it was just this childlike
simplicity which gave force to his denunciation. He
saw the wrong that was being done on the earth, not
with the eyes of one who had grown up in its atmos-
phere and accepted its conditions as inevitable, but
with the insight and clear power of judgment of a
child suddenly confronting the things of the present
with the laws of justice and truth.

Dolling was never a Church defender. He cared
nothing at all for the Establishment and all the social
influence which the Establishment represents. " If your
heart is aflame," he said, " to defend the Church of
England, first, at any rate, see that you cleanse
her."

"As to the present so-called crisis," he declared, in
the last time of upheaval, "the real crisis, the one that
ought to make Churchmen, on their knees in penitence
before God, confess their negligence, is that the vast
majority of English people care nothing for the Church,
many even nothing for God."

The smug respectability which Boiling's biographer
brands as the evil genius of reformed Christendom, was
his perpetual enemy. As the end approached and he
felt the years passing without seeing any great change,
as he measured the condition of such a parish as Poplar
against the dull platitudes which he heard in high
places, his denunciation took on a fiercer tone. The
articles which he published in The Pilot just before his

141

DE MORTUIS

death are a scathing criticism of " the genius of the
Church of England."

" She is tied to a perfectly unworkable system, with
no power of adapting herself to modern needs. She has
had now for many generations, and still has, a perfect
genius for destroying all enthusiasm, a genius for getting
rid of her best unless her best will become common-
place. Is this too hard a description of the Church of
England?"

In the unhappy bishops he finds the centre and head
of the offence. " They have but one opportunist canon
of dogma : be commonplace, be respectable, after the
sober-minded ritual of the Church of England." "On
no question of any importance, religious or social, have
the bishops given any lead to their people unless they
have been driven to it." We are left with " nothing
but a complacent failure." Undoubtedly the strain of
the work, the perpetual begging for the machinery of
the parish, and the absence of colour and life, the
intolerable weariness and content of his East London
people, were here telling upon him. " We are as a
whole bloodless and anasmic." " At Portsmouth our
chief duty was to repress ; here it is to incite " this
is the burden of his cry. He saw wrongs unrighted all
around him ; the poor perishing and no man laying it
to heart. He found overcrowding, with the laws pro-
tecting the poor always evaded. " My people," was
his pathetic appeal, " have been dealt with unjustly."
They have " never been given a chance. Think of the
houses that they are born in, the overcrowding, the
drains, the damp." " The law that safeguards the
poor is always in the hands of those who do not put it
into force." " Charity only makes people meaner and
baser, and will never prove the solution of the problem."

142

THE CHURCH MILITANT

He demanded in the names of these disinherited millions,
not charity, but justice. The spirit of the child delight-
ing in its life gave place to the spirit of the strong man
having work laid upon him to do and straitened till
it be accomplished. He went down to his death,
appealing to the whole Church " for the righting of
wrongs that cry continually into the ears of the Lord
God of Sabaoth."

Dolling' s radiant personality exercised a unique
fascination upon all classes of men. The man was
entirely sincere, filled with one persistent enthusiasm,
the love of God and man. It is an Irishman with no
respect for the sober conventions of English life. Some-
times he is singing comic songs with his boys in the
smoke-filled atmosphere of cellar or attic. Again, he
is leading an agitation against the liquor interest, or for
some measure of social progress. Criminals are sent to
him, and those who have failed, and all receive welcome.
He kept the affection and confidence of Winchester
through all struggles and for ten years. He encouraged
dancing and healthy joy, and loved especially his riotous
soldiers and sailors. His mothers' meeting whom he
addressed as " My Dears " was one of the most un-
conventional of all his gatherings. In his church he
varied simple extempore prayer with the elaborate pro-
cession and ritual in which his people delighted. He
scandalised enormous numbers of respectable persons.
"With your ultra-High Church proclivities on the one
hand," wrote the Warden of Winchester, " and your
Socialistic teaching on the other, no sober-minded and
loyal citizen can be expected to support the mission."
" Last came Father Dolling," wrote a Protestant paper,
" a biretta perched on his most disloyal head." "He
stirreth up the people," writes Father Tyrrell, " would,

143

DE MORTUIS

I suspect, be the truest formulation of his ecclesiastical
iniquities." And the opposition was not only stirred up
among the Protestants. His social enthusiasms seriously
offended numbers of those who supported his Catholic
teaching. He threw open his church in Poplar for a
meeting of protest against the East End Water Com-
panies. " The withholding of rain from the district,"
wrote a scandalised shareholder, " is God's punishment,
and to ninety-nine Catholics in a hundred, the present
visitation upon the East End of London is consequent
upon the appointment of Mr. Dolling to St. Saviour's."
But at his death the opposition was drowned in the uni-
versal recognition that one had gone whose place could
never be adequately filled. He has set a new standard
in the possibilities of the Church of England and its
relation to the life of the poor. He stands within
this communion, a figure filled with passionate zeal for
justice and love of those down-trodden by the world ;
one of a class mainly, alas ! confined to other branches
of the Catholic Church. " Many hard things are being
said against us " his farewell to St. Agatha's is a
summary of his life " many doubt our loyalty to the
Church of England. But you will believe us, I am sure,
when we say that we have had but one single aim, to
bring some poor people in a slum in Landport to the
knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ."

144

BEFORE THE DAWN

" They made me a, keeper of the vineyards : but mine own
vineyard have I not kept."

JUNE IN ENGLAND

station has been built where thin branches of
__ railway shoot off on either side from the main
stem. And hard by the station have gathered the
habitations of men ; so that the passing traveller sees
a vision of little red houses nestling amid the cherry
and apple orchards, with all round the long fields of
hops and growing corn. Down these steel tracks,
which stretch out straight over the level land till
lost in the haze of the horizon, hurries all the traffic
of Empire. As we wait, the drowsy afternoon is
torn with a shriek and the earth shaken. In a
whirlwind of smoke and fire the mail passes that is
hurling through our quiet air passengers for Brindisi
and Singapore. Then the train from which we have
alighted gathers up its belongings and thoughtfully
puffs its way after its violent comrade. Finally, in
quite leisurely fashion, the quaint collection of carriages
in the siding, with the antique locomotive at its head,
makes up its mind to depart down one of the divergent
branches. Drawing out from the little town sleeping
so quietly in the June sunlight, it moves slowly up-
wards from the plain towards the villages which lie
among the hollows of the hills.

147

The platform of each tiny toy station shows white in
the sunshine, with green growing things and climbing
roses pushing through the fences and over the white-
washed palings. The town traveller, smeared with the
hurry and dust of the cities, finds a sudden restfulness
and serenity as he alights at one of tLese. When
the train with its burden has passed onward, and the
last echoes have died away, something of the great
peace of the summer afternoon gathers round him, and
envelopes him like a garment. In the little lane which
leads from the station to the village the air is filled with
the scent of grasses and the new-mown hay. On either
side the full fields stretch upwards, with the clover and
tall daisies making a tapestry of bright colours. There
is no constant stillness. Now a light wind moves along
the tree-tops. Insects with gauzy wings are dancing in
the light. There is a rustling under the hedges and
along the borders of the meadows. You can almost
hear the music of the sap as it rises in its million tiny
channels, pushing the growing life outwards into the
buds and the petals of the expanding flowers. Life
life everywhere : the song of laughing, overflowing life
is the melody sung in exultation and content by all the
world in these shining summer days. It is heard
proclaimed in the hedges crowded with honeysuckle
and wild roses, and the climbing plants rushing
upwards towards the sun. It speaks from the little
gardens with their fragrant old-fashioned flowers
pinks and sweet-williams, and the glory of the tall white
lilies. It riots triumphant in the weeds which have
pitched their camps on the sides of all the country
lanes, now waist-deep in tangled grasses : with shy blue
flowers hiding in their depths, and above a blaze of
yellow cups and white stars and crimson bells. A turn

148

JUNE IN ENGLAND

of the lane discloses suddenly the wide panorama of the
plain from which we have climbed. Here is a good land
and a large : a great green land with scattered red-
roofed villages, and standing from their midst the white
cones of the hop-kilns and the dark towers of village
churches. In the boundaries of a remote distance
brood the blue round-shouldered hills. Across the
plain into some mysterious land beyond, run the straight
white roads the white roads which lead to the end of
the world.

The land is fair always in the later harvest, when
the promise of the year is fulfilled, with the cornfields
and their sheaves alternating with the hop-vines under
the blue sky ; or in the autumn, when all the leaves are
gold, and the distant church spires stand out from a
background of fiery splendour ; but fairest in the month
of expectancy, of preparation, when the year has first
gathered together the pageant of the early summer.
These are enchanted days, from the clear brightness of
the dawn, through the splendid oppression of the mid-
day heat, down the long afternoon, till the sun drops
behind the pine-trees, and the light glances level along
the world ; and in the gathering twilight a thousand
fairy lights kindle over the great plain, and on a still
evening you may hear the sound of many bells. " Then
shall the earth bring forth her increase." Some-
thing of the exultation of the rich fulfilment of the
promise has escaped in such seasons even into this
island set in its grey northern seas. In the pollen-
laden air, with all the scents and music of the world,
the old apprehension of the miracle of the passing of
dead matter into life, acquires a sudden vivid meaning.
" He sendeth the springs into the valleys that run among
the hills." " The valleys also shall be so thick with

149

BEFORE THE DAWN

corn that they shall laugh and sing." "Before you the
mountains and the hills shall hreak forth into singing,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."

II

In one of these hroad fruitful valleys, facing the sun,
and open to the delicate air of the south, stands the
village which has held, since before the dawn of history,
the homes of the passing generations of men. The
houses gather round the green, and straggle in lessening
avenues down the diverging roads. In the centre is the
old inn, the focus of all social life, in the great parlour
of which the ancients were wont to gather after the toil of
day, smoking their long pipes in a soothing silence. Hard
by is the blacksmith's forge ; the pond, with the shadows
of the tall trees over it ; and the general shop ; and
the little primitive school, with roses trespassing on the
palings and knocking at the windows. The little thatched
cottages have their wooden gates and fences, and their
red-tiled footpaths, and their gardens gay with flowers.
On the hill-top is the home of a family with a high
record of service in Church and State, a great white
house with a little chapel by it, within all gold and
jewelled with coloured glass; and the tombs of old
knights in armour with crossed legs and folded hands ;
and the petition for the prayer of the passing stranger,
that the place of those whose hearts once beat so high
with passionate desire may at the last be found in
peace. And up the road that winds through the
woods and meadows is the little church, with its old
Norman arch and square time-beaten tower, gathering
round it the bodies of the humble, forgotten dead.
Here was the centre of sorrow, exultation and pain : the

150

JUNE IN ENGLAND

home of mirth and weeping. The mysteries of Birth
and of Death found here a meaning and significance.
At length when the tale was told and the lights
extinguished here were gathered enemy and friend, saint
and sinner, in that sleep which henceforth nothing would
disturb hut the trump of the Archangel heralding the
last judgment of God. Ever within the vision of each
patient toiler were the graves of his fathers, the place
where he also would one day be laid. The tombs
and gravestones travelled backwards to a near past.
Behind were the shadowy figures of the dead, resting
through all the centuries, whose blood still beat in
those now for a season enduring the sunlight and
the winter rain. And with the old church itself,
the ivy-covered windows and grey arches and tower,
which had looked down on so many hurrying gene-
rations, thought is swept backward through the gulfs
of time into a far-off England; which once hewed
the white stone from the rock and raised these towers
and high-roofed arches and swinging bells ; that in
all the long ages to come, through the great awaken-
ings and voyagings which were to carry men into
stranger and more hazardous regions than those first
pioneers ever dreamt of or desired, this fair building
should testify to the imperishable faith of those who
thus could build.

m

It is all passing : crumbling visibly year by year,
almost day by day : and the thought infects with a
kind of austerity and sadness the glory of these rich
June days. For into these remote valleys, long hidden
unheeded amongst the hills, at length has entered Pro-

151

BEFORE THE DAWN

gress : and Progress with all the strange uncanny shapes
which follow in her retinue. At first the rout came
timidly, with hesitating footsteps : later with impetuous-
ness and a certain arrogance as of those with an accepted
supremacy and triumph. The old inn is going under,
defeated in competition with the new house, glaring
in the raw hideousness of red and white paint ; the
enterprise of a firm of neighbouring hrewers, with the
publican a hired servant ; and active catering for the
stranger and the insatiable thirst of travel. The black-
smith is overshadowed by the corrugated edifice of the
"Mid Kent Motor Company: Repairs executed at the
shortest notice." The great house has been sold by the
bankrupt heir of the old line to a family of German
Jews. The chapel with its ancient tombs remains
undisturbed: but the wealth of South Africa pours as
through a funnel into the countryside, and converts the
peasants who were sold with the estate into a race of
parasites. Secure in comfort liberally dispensed, they
are for the most part prepared to return deference and
the aping of the old feudal life to masters of alien race
and tradition. The little church is in the main deserted.
Services are continued, but the bulk of the diminishing
village population rarely attend. On Sundays they gather
in aimless groups in service-time outside the new public-
house or at the cross-roads to see the motors pass. The
Motor is indeed the keynote of the newer changes. All
these June Sundays a procession of wandering locomo-
tives hustles along the roads and avenues. The air
is vocal with their hooting and shrill cries, the ritual of
the New Religion, as they clank and crash through the
village, leaving behind the moment's impression of the
be-goggled occupants, an evil smell, a cloud of grey
dust.

152

JUNE IN ENGLAND

Despite this revival of the countryside, the newest
industry and recreation which is finding a market
for so many derelict estates and bringing a fevered
energy along the old roads of England, the people are
slowly vanishing from the village and the surrounding
fields. No one notes their departure, nor greatly cares
whether they go or stay. The new wealthy live in a life
of their own, careless of any responsibility for the peasant
peoples surrounding them. And the fanner, adjusting
with astuteness his industry to the newer conditions, is
basking in a brief spell of prosperity. The land is pass-
ing back into grass and pasture, cattle taking the place
of men. In the new fruit farms and hop farms, during
seed-time the work is huddled through by the old men and
the children and the few who can be attracted to remain.
And the harvest is reaped by nomadic hordes, lured out
for a season from the slums of the cities, blinking in dull
wonder at the strange world of sunshine and silences to
which they have been conveyed. So first at fruit-picking
and later at the hop harvest, the litter of their encamp-
ments is manifest in the day, and the lights of their
revelry shine far into the night. The casual labourers of
the lowest depths of the cities are spewed out over our
green land riotous and rejoicing. The old inhabitants,
secure in the pride of ancient heritage, gaze dismally at
the pandemonium. With such double assistance from
above and beneath wealth which is the plaything of
rich men above, poverty which is their scorn below
rural England confronts the exodus of its peoples with
a stout heart and undismayed.

Only the magic of the evening becomes charged
with a sadness in the memory of all the days that
have gone and the homes henceforth for ever desolate.
And in the stillness of the summer night, while the stars

153

BEFORE THE DAWN

flash over the great plain and one hy one the lights
of the villages go out into darkness, the silence with its
cool air and scent of flowers drives home to the heart
something of the sorrow of other lights extinguished, as
the children of England pass from their own land into
the cities where June itself is hut a memory.

IV

Far to the northward, as the shadow creeps over the
valley, one can almost discern the great lights streaming
up hehind the hills. In a momentary picture appears
the vision of the labyrinth of lamplit streets, the crowded
thoroughfares, the crowded warrens and tenements, the
restless life of those who have gone.

So in this June, with the magic of its passing hours,
Time, which changes all good and evil things, fashions
from the ruins of the old a newer England.

154

IN DEJECTION NEAR TOOTING

HOW to get there ? That is not easy, because it
is the place of all forgotten things. But across
the river you may find municipal trams inscribed with
its inspiriting title, and by elbowing out a few tired
workgirls and edging away aged men of battered
physique obtain the desired seat. You journey tardily
for immense spaces of time past a moving show of
shadow shapes of mean houses, in which airy nothing
has taken a local habitation and a name. The texture
changes from slum to suburb and from suburb back to
slum. At length, amid an impression of rawness,
public-house, and red brick, the final jarring outrage
of the municipal brake announces your destination.

The cemetery made it first, established as far from
human intercourse as was compatible with a reasonable
fare for the conveyance of the remains of the departed.
In the old English village the dead were buried in
friendly fashion round the most frequented centre, the
village church. In the old English town the houses
gathered comfortably by the churchyard in a kind of
sanitary reformer's nightmare. For in former days it
was desired that the dead should be unforgotten, and
death should be much in the minds of the living. But
in the modern city, eager with its pursuit of material
comfort, nothing is less desired than the evidence of the

155

BEFORE THE DAWN

end of it all, the presence of those who before disquieted
themselves in vain. The emblems of mortality are apt
to weaken the zeal of the pursuit of a corner in pork or
an accumulation of much goods in store. So it came
to pass that the dead were hurriedly shovelled into the
ground at Upper Tooting.

And as through the presence of the dead the place
seemed secure, gradually there followed all other things
that it is desirable should be hidden away. Wandering
solitary in the Tooting uplands, amidst turnip fields
and coarse yellow charlock, I lighted suddenly upon
some of these. On every high hill towered a monstrous
building of that particular blend of austerity and dignity
dear to the municipal mind. Each was planned of vast
spreading dimension, with innumerable blank windows,
surrounded by high polished walls. Down below in the
valley, conveniently adjacent to the cemetery, was the
immense fever hospital, a huddle of buildings of corru-
gated iron. In front was a gigantic workhouse ; behind, a
gigantic lunatic asylum ; to the right, a gigantic barrack
school ; to the left, a gigantic prison. Other shadowy
and enormous buildings rose dimly in the background.
Yet even the presence of these monuments of ruin could
not arrest the eruption of mean streets, driven forward by
the pressure behind them of unthinkable numbers. All
round the fever hospital crept their red tentacles, the
slums of the future little red terraces leaning against
each other as if reluctant to advance, yet pushed bodily
forward, ending in builders' chaos and the indecent,
naked skeletons of terraces yet to be.

The discovery of these fortress prisons threw sudden
light upon a problem which had often proved difficult.
In Italy and the South the English visitor is shocked
and saddened by the spectacle of the old, incredibly

156

IN DEJECTION NEAR TOOTING

withered and wrinkled, lying in the sunlight and beg-
ging of the passer-by. Where are the similar old of
England ? At last I had found them behind high
walls, at Upper Tooting. Here also are our brigands,
enemies of society, where they can trouble society no
more. In the South are the young also, begging,
uncared for, unless subtly kidnapped by the Church.
Our orphan young, safely guarded from that Church's
activities, are secure at Upper Tooting. So by a
smooth-working, efficient machinery all superfluous
and unnecessary things are sorted out and ticketed
and packed into the places prepared for them.

As I gazed at these large silent palaces on the
cold winter afternoon I was able to frame some
picture of this ordered and regular existence. All
would be smooth, polished, spotlessly clean ; warmed
by hot water, and with a steam laundry. Par-
ticulars would be scheduled and classified; sanitation
upon the latest methods ; dietary calculated by a
scientific scale, with bread weighed by the ounce and
calculated to a crumb. Discipline would be perfect, and
movements directed by the sound of a bell. Each
institution had its chaplain. There was probably in
each a library of edifying books. Hundreds of thousands
of pounds had been expended upon every building, and
the expense was borne universally, and, on the whole,
contentedly, by the citizens who lived in the warmth
far away. Gradually there rose before the inward eye
some vision of the life within : and with that vision the
apprehension of much before inexplicable. From the
turnip fields of Tooting I apprehended the British
Empire and something of its meaning ; why we
always conquered and never assimilated our conquests ;
why we were so just and so unloved. Amidst alien

157

BEFORE THE DAWN

races we have brought rest and security, order out
of chaos, equality of justice, a patient service of recti-
tude which is one of the wonders of the world. Yet
there is not one amongst these alien peoples who
would lift a finger to ensure the perpetuation of our
rule, or shed a tear over its destruction. For the spirit
of that Empire clean, efficient, austere, intolerably
just is the spirit which has banished to these forgotten
barrack-prisons and behind high walls the helpless
young and the helpless old, the maimed, the restless,
and the dead.

Night fell as thus dismally I mused amongst the
vegetable gardens of Upper Tooting. The fortresses
which marked the bulwarks of British civilisation
loomed menacing in the twilight. A cold wind stirred
the discoloured grasses. A bell clanged mournfully
from the distant prison. I shivered and fled the scene :
with a vague discomfort which did not disappear till I
had again mingled with the procession of mean street
and shabby edifice ; had recrossed the river and recog-
nised again the kindly familiar buildings, the ample
eating-houses, the crowds, if insurgent, unconfined. I
shall never see Tooting again, but the memory of it will
mingle with many a disordered dream. And when I
hear, as hear I do daily for my sins, large men with
chains and seals and rings discoursing upon modern
Imperialism, the Empire, the decadence of Southern
races, and the unparalleled results of modern progress ;
I say nothing, for nothing could make them understand.
But there rises the vision of the bleak hills and the
fortress prisons crowning them, gaunt and silent in
the dying day. And the eloquence becomes charged
with an atmosphere of varying emotion : ironical ; a
little fantastic ; not lacking in tears.

158

THE BUEDEN OF LONDON

not send a philosopher to London," wrote
Heine, " and for heaven's sake do not send a
poet. The grim seriousness of all things, the colossal
monotony, the engine-like activity, the moroseness even
of pleasure, and the whole of this exaggerated London
will break his heart." The statement appears to the
plain man but the sneer of the unpleasant foreigner,
scarce concealing his eager envy. The stuccoed
squares, the grave evidences of accumulation, the lines
of terraces attesting a placid opulence small wonder,
thinks the plain man, that the unpleasant foreigner
gnashes his teeth and rails in fury. And those to
whom the plain man counts for nothing and the
stuccoed terrace appears but vanity turn again, and yet
again, to hymn the praise of "London." The city
standing " at the entering of the sea," the picturesque
centre of the commerce of the world ; the golden glory
of Piccadilly in a summer sunset; the river with its
dreams of a dead past that cannot die, immortalised in
the " London Voluntaries " ; the mystery and magic of
the November twilight in street and alley who has not
cut his tooth in salad days with the first proclamation
of these discoveries?

Only with widened knowledge and the greyness
which life brings does the aspirant learn that these

159

BEFORE THE DAWN

are not London. He has fallen into the common error
of mistaking "London" for London. London is not
the City, spinning the financial web of the world. Nor
is London the squares and parks and gardens westward,
and the places of healthful or of desolate pleasure.
These are but the accidents and chance development :
alien to the essence, the soul of London. As a pleasure
city " London " is surpassed by Vienna, as a centre of
wealth by New York, as a home of art and literature by
Paris or Pekin. But London is neither a pleasure city
nor a centre of wealth nor a home of art and literature.
London is an aggregation amorphous and chaotic :
six and a quarter millions of humanity. The aggrega-
tion is composed of a homogeneous substance : the City
Dweller a novelty in the world gazing out upon the
universe from a crowded street, in a swarming mob,
from over the shoulders or beneath the legs of his
fellows. He is coagulated into a broad smudgy ring
round the city which lives and moves. He dwells
apart from the city which desires and is satisfied.
Realisation of his existence, in its aimlessness and
acquiescence, chills as with a sudden bleakness the
feverish enthusiasm of the minor poet for the glory
and greatness of London.

Who will interpret the soul of this London this
condensation of the unimportant which for a century
has sucked in the life of the country districts, and is
now turning out a third or fourth generation crushed,
distorted, battered into futility by perpetual struggle
towards no rational end ? Observers have attempted
the task, and all acknowledged failure. G. W.
Steevens, after sizing up America and India, is bidden
to perform similar service for London. He walks
through it from south to north, from east to west.

160

THE BURDEN OF LONDON

He notes its markets, ita food consumption, its
drainage system; he finds himself bewildered, baffled.
He abandons the effort as beyond his powers. Charles
Booth assails the problem with a staff of helpers. He
issues seventeen stout volumes, life, labour, religion, or
the lack of it, of the people Class A, Class B, maps of
blue, yellow, and red of brilliance and complexity. He
confesses he is no nearer estimation at the end of it all.
Figures by the hundred thousand, woven into curves, or
condensed into tables, statistics of overcrowding, of
drunkenness, of pauperism, of crime, all pass like a tale
of little meaning, though the words are strong. The
age still waits for the interpreter of this, the strangest
riddle of the modern world.

Yet this essential London should not be a compli-
cated study. Knowing the life of one, you know the
life of all. Only no one has yet apprehended the life
of that one. The city is, for the most part, an end-
less series of replicas similar streets, similar people,
similar occupations : crowded existence, drifting through
the choked and narrow ways. You journey on the
tardy tram by stages linking together conspicuous
gin-palaces, the only landmarks of successive regions :
now you are in "Walworth," now in " Peckham,"
again in "Deptford." The varying titles are useful but
deluding. The stuff is homogeneous, woven of drab
buildings and a life set in grey. Lay down an inter-
minable labyrinth of mean two-storied cottages. Pepper
the concoction plentifully with churches, school-build-
ings, and block-dwellings of an assorted variety of
ugliness. Cram into this as much labouring humanity
as it will hold, and then cram in some more. Label
with any name, as Stepney or Kentish Town. You
have in essence the particular ghetto that you desire.

161 M

BEFORE THE DAWN

Beyond this ring the blotch we term London sprawls
into still more unknown and desolate regions whose life
is clogged and heavy owing to their distance from the
central heart. On the one side, in a lopsided and
monstrous outgrowth, the city spreads out into vast
shallow suburbs of the labouring classes, stretched over
the marsh land below the level of the sea. Here are
districts so far removed from the place of work as to
have become mere gigantic dormitories. Man rises up
a great while before day to go forth to his work and to
labour until the evening. The whole margin of life of
the labourer disappears in the transit. The scuffle into
the city, the prolonged and odorous journey, the scuffle
out again, the hastily wolfed-up meal, curtailed sleep,
represent the home life of the people. To these for-
gotten, nameless regions, apart from the inhabitants
themselves and the occasional forlorn dust-collector,
" no man comes, nor hath come, since the making of
the world." On other margins of the city the texture
insensibly is transformed into something quaint and
strange. The lines of cottages protrude into bow
windows. Children are scooped inside instead of dis-
charged outside the houses. The population clothes
itself in black coats, entertains yearnings after respect-
ability, and attends on Sunday places of public worship.
This is Clerkdom : Dulwich and Clapham and Harringay ;
where pale men protest Imperialism and women are
driven by the tedium of nothingness into Extension
Lectures or the Primrose League an uncanny and
humorous region, illuminated with perplexing ideals.

But these regions are also parasitic. London in its
characteristic product is the city of the ghetto. Here
gather the unparalleled masses of the obscure. They
are members of no trades union. They are inspired by

162

no faith in progress. They are forgotten, as it seems,
alike of man and of God. Labouring populations, in
which no one rises above the rank of the local publican,
outnumber the inhabitants of many great kingdoms.
The dreariness of their lives does not depend on their
poverty. They are scourged with specific ills, of which
no outsider knows or cares. But the tragedy resides in
their acquiescence : the absence of eager revolt and
protest: the listless toleration of intolerable things.
They extend under sunshine and darkness, an inter-
minable acreage, shabby, impotent, grotesquely negli-
gible. They imbibe open-mouthed any specious illusion,
cheering for blood when full of meat, when meatless
clamorous for plunder. Few know of their existence :
none realise its import. Populations of great colonies
or European capitals could be torn from them without
appreciable diminution. Who would even be conscious
of change if, say, Wandsworth or Hoxton vanished with
to-morrow's sunrise? A wave of human life has silently
become pent up into a menacing congestion. There has
been nothing like it before in the history of the world.
Please God, after its destruction there shall be nothing
like it again.

What of the race that is being reared in this stagnant
marshland, lying aside from and unmoved by the stream
of progress ? No one knows. It is a portentous vision
of silence : a mob drifting from the cradle to the grave,
without ever rising to articulate speech. No poet
immortalises himself in " Ballads of Bermondsey," or
" Lines written in dejection near Haggerston." No
passionate protest from Pentonville rouses as with a
trumpet-call. No Camberwell woman's love-letters
disturb the serenity of the literary horizon. Visitors,
indeed, from a different universe of being penetrate

163

BEFORE THE DAWN

these regions, attempt to crystallise into words the
cloudy emotions of the ghetto. A Gissing will set
himself to record the life of the decent and the ignohly
decent. A daily newspaper will encourage the con-
fession of their half-baked theologies and atheisms. A
Davidson will proclaim, with a kind of scorching flame,
the futility of life at thirty bob a week. But these
interpretations remain, for the dissected subject, things
distant and unknown. Noise, indeed, he makes in
abundance in his brief passage between two Eternities.
The play of children, the mirthless jest, the quavering
militant melody, the sounds of contest and blasphemy,
rises continually towards the quiet stars. He has been
discerned emerging from beyond the river at daybreak,
or trampling among his friends in a scuffle for the tram
to convey him to his lair in the gathering twilight. But
the mystery of the inner springs of his existence, the
happiness, acquiescence, or discomfort of life as viewed
from the sixth story of a block- dwelling or the half of
a house in a mean street, are locked up beneath that
harassed inscrutable face of his, a secret he will carry
with him to the grave.

Such is the Burden of London : unfelt by the
majority who pass by : weighing like a nightmare upon
some of those who gaze forward towards the coming
years. The vision is of London not, like the Holy
City, at unity with itself: but a manifest object-lesson
in a nation falling asunder, " being old." To-day we
discern a race which is separating into communities
profoundly ignorant of each others' existence : cities of
artisans, cities of clerks, cities of labourers, cities of the
wealthy. At bottom this is for the most part a parasitic
population : from which the higher energies are not
demanded, and by which in consequence these are not

164

supplied : lacking the pushfulness of the artisan of the
North as much as the ohstinate endurance of the
peasant of the fields. We apprehend hundreds of
thousands engaged in the supply of artificial wants, in
carrying people from here to there, in ministering to
the changing fashion, or pandering to the unchanging
appetites of men. And we recognise a population
destined ever to extend. Greater London in less than
thirty years is to amount to ten millions. The main
part of the increase will be woven of this drah material.
North, east, south, and west the aggregation is
silently pushing outwards like some gigantic plasmo-
dium : spreading slimy arms over the surrounding fields,
heavily dragging after them the ruin of its desolation.
And Tooting and East Ham, and Plumstead and Silver-
town, are boru into a world which shows no joy at their
advent. Humanity staggers at the vision of the next
generation : uninvigorated by the influx of the country
life, ravaged by the diseases of overcrowding in dwelling
and area, dulness, vacuity of labour, and lust for artificial
excitement : dead to the faiths which once provided a
tangible background to existence.

" Revolving this and many things," one can note the
astonishing prescience of a poet of the far-back, long-
despised, " early Victorian " era, who found in the
blind Bull-god of the spoil of Assyria the image of
the god of this people ; having wings but not to fly
with : and eyes, but not to look up with : bearing a
written image engraved of which he knows not, and
cannot read it; crowned, but not for honour:

" Those heavy wings spread high
So sure of flight which do not fly,
That set gaze never on the sky,
Those scriptured flanks it cannot see.

165

BEFORE THE DAWN

Its crown, a brow-contracting load,
Its planted feet which trusts the sod,

O Nineveh, was this thy god,
Thine also mighty Nineveh ? "

But until the end is revealed no man can know whether
this or some other god be indeed the god of the city.

166

THE NEW REVOLUTION

struggle between belief and unbelief," said
JL Goethe, " is the only thing in the memoirs of
humanity worth considering." And the problem of
the religion and general outlook on the world which is
likely to be evolved by an age of tranquillity and comfort
is the problem which most immediately faces the civilisa-
tion of to-day and to-morrow. For the first time in
many centuries, and especially in the Anglo-Saxon world,
in England, in parts of America, and in the Colonies,
we see a race developing who have experienced nothing
but a serene and ordered existence. From the beginning
they have been sheltered from the disturbing elements
of life. They do not possess imagination necessary to
realise that this is an abnormal and transitory phase of
the world's development. All their accepted ideas in art,
ethics, and religion, are inherited from times when this
tranquillity was lacking. They are becoming vaguely
conscious that for them the language is strained, ex-
travagant, unreal. They have no conception of the
meaning of such a cosmic upheaval, the disarrangement
of a universe, as, for example, the great disturbance
of '89 in France or the deliquescence of the whole
social order before the invader in 1870. Even Nature's
catastrophies have been sedulously removed. There is
no fear of great epidemics, and only the occasional remote

167

BEFORE THE DAWN

and unrealised echo of such an unexpected destruction
as that of Martinique. Undoubtedly the contrast be-
tween such a life as that of Dulwich or Toronto or
Dunedin and the life of all the past must implicate the
coming of great changes in human life and its outlook
upon the world.

Towards Nature, towards himself, and towards the
apprehension of any spiritual principle outside and
behind these, man's ideas are becoming profoundly
modified. In Nature he has come to recognise the
element of permanence. He is at home for the first
time in an orderly world. The old fear the panic
fear of some sudden menace no longer lurks in the
shadows. The feelings of horror with regard to Nature
and its operations and the feelings of insecurity are
passing away from the minds of men. The general
view of Nature which this new race is cultivating is
that of the well-ordered watering-place which is the
sole experience of most of them : a cleaned beach,
breakwaters to temper the rough onslaught of the sea,
with promenade and pier and safe playing-ground for
the children, and the faint, emotional strains of the
nigger minstrels in the evening.

And the progress of intelligence has drawn each man
closer together to his neighbour. The world has
become one. With an absence of any large and im-
pelling impulse towards reform, men are vaguely desirous
that all their neighbours should enjoy some sort of
similar comfort to their own. Mr. Gilkes, in his little,
most suggestive essay on the subject, has emphasised
this restlessness in face of the evidence of pain. " They
do not wish any longer," he says, " that regulations
made by man should keep men from working and playing
as they ought to work and play. A man can no longer

168

THE NEW REVOLUTION

eat his dinner comfortably when there are heneath him
dungeons full of his fellow-creatures whom his own act
has placed there, however strictly legal that act may
be, and consequently there is a general impatience of all
privilege, all excess of possession and of comfort."

With this altruism which finds its expression on the
one hand in the largeness of so-called charity, and on
the other hand in the general demand for the Churches
to cease to strive towards impossible perfections and
spiritual ardours, there has come a tendency to acquiesce
in an average standard of attainment. In a recent con-
troversy bearing the title "Do we Believe? " the popula-
tions of the suburbs poured out their hearts in the columns
of a daily paper. It was instructive to note the general
revolt from the violence and disturbance of religions
which drove men and women out of their accustomed
ways. The demand came more and more to con-
centrate upon a vague, amiable philanthropy. The
less reputable sins were to be banished. The duty of
man was to lead the life of the good citizen, voting
in parliamentary if not in municipal elections, and at
Christmas-time making liberal provision for the feeding
and clothing of the poor.

The sense of sin and of a great humility and all the
vast machinery of aspiration and penitence which have
gathered around these, have become clouded in the
minds of the dwellers in the modern cities.

But it is in the relation of man to God the greatest
changes are evident. With the coming of this gospel
of decency and good manners there has vanished those
ardours and agonies of the soul whose interest now
appears mainly pathological. No one can be blind to
the process, accompanying this diffused ethic, of the
weakening apprehension of spiritual things.

169

BEFORE THE DAWN

"If he received some sign," says Mr. Gilkes again,
" to show him what he should do, some sign which
showed him when he was in danger of doing wrong,
which revealed to him his ideal, he might do right con-
tinually ; but he receives no sign ; perhaps once in a
month or a year he sees his ideal plainly and God
plainly, but often, even before he reaches the end of the
road where he was when he saw it, the colour has faded
from what he saw. He says the words which he said
before, but they are dead words, and he would no longer
go readily to death for the truth which they express."

When in time of order the new revolution is success-
fully accomplished, there are some who will look forward
with longing to the change beyond the change. In
the provision of elements of permanent value for the
life of man periods of disturbance have always been
more conspicuous than periods of certitude. The times
of disorder and unsettlement when men suffered from
oppression, trembled in terror before vague and inexplic-
able forces, were ravaged by great plagues and lived
always in uncertainty, were the times which produced
the highest developments of art and the finest flower of
human character. When man was doubtful if he would
see to-morrow's sunrise he built as if not dreaming of
a perishable home. To-day when he cannot believe
that death will touch him, and his orderly life stretches
forward as an endless end of the world, he will leave for
the amazement of future ages the Crystal Palace and
the City Temple and the Peabody Building.

Dr. Arnold, in his " Survey of History," came to the
conclusion that after all the changes of the past the
world was now entering into a course of steady, orderly,
and consistent development in a phase from which the
unexpected would be abolished. Man would sit down

170

THE NEW REVOLUTION

comfortably in a world whose forces at length he rightly
estimated. It was a belief characteristic of an early
Victorian Age unable to conceive of any more perfect
life than that represented by its mahogany sideboards
and its material opulence. It is a more hopeful view
that we are on the edge of a process of profound change.
Ruins if furnished with plush and alpaca and labelled
Brixton and Holloway, will not provide a permanent
habitation for the soul of man. Assuredly the con-
dition of the ultimate flower of the process of evolution
in the expanding middle class of England and America
is not a condition of stable equilibrium. They cultivate
habits of regularity. They weave themselves into
other men's ideas. They are cut off from disturbing
realities. They attend places of religious worship ; but
they hear language of ancient liturgies wrung out of
passion and terror which seems to them archaic or
meaningless. They are conscious of a vague, emotional
satisfaction at an evening service or singing the hymns
of childhood. Sometimes they feel a little queer at the
death of a child or at the signs of the coming of old
age. Occasionally, despite the avoidance of Nature and
its mysteries, some old memories, the smell of Spring
and Autumn, a wind blown into the city with the scent
of flowers or up the river from the sea, stir into momen-
tary disquietude emotions which have lain long buried
under the weight of custom and routine. Love and
Birth and Death, those divine Anarchists, are always
disturbing, as Plato apprehended long ago, to any satis-
fied civilisation. These, with the exultations and
agonies which form their " great allies," may be trusted
to disintegrate any society which has banished mys-
tery from its midst and turned its back on realities ;
and set itself down to use and wont, pitiful pleasures,

171

BEFORE THE DAWN

and the obstinate fear of change ; and put aside the
heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible
world.

How the change will come it is impossible to foresee.
Perhaps there may arise the sudden and unexpected
outbreak of forces fermenting among the neglected
populations, of whose existence and whose hunger for the
material goods denied them this ordered state has but
little apprehension. Perhaps, as in a former period of
Imperial peace, a universally awakening consciousness
may protest the futility and worthlessness of it all.
Weariness will come of the " impracticable hours " of
life divorced from passion and emptied of high, spiritual
enterprise. However excited, those concerned with the
soul's development rather than with the attainment of
material comfort will be prepared to welcome the change.
For such change will tear down the veil of comfortable
things, velvet and cushions and fine clothes, which man
will always raise if he can between himself and the
unknown. Behind are the realities with whom he is
never at ease, and whose acquaintance he is always
anxious to elude; himself: the world of real things;
God Who is the Beginning and the End of all.

172

TEE BLASPHEMY OF OPTIMISM

TO assail one who has bewildered many decent
people and added to life a new literary inspiration
is a thankless and dismal task. To join issue with
Mr. Chesterton, whose work is a perpetual stimulus to
humility and astonishment, would appear but a mournful
ingratitude. Nevertheless, it is time for some dull
person to raise the banner of protest, however sober
and grave, against the philosophy of life which Mr.
Chesterton is steadily hammering into the brain
of the English householder. The very brilliancy
of his weapons, the paradox, the bold metaphor, the
statement which leaves one doubled up and speechless,
the divine lunacy of his intoxicated inspiration, foretells
the success of his onslaught upon things customary,
honoured, and secure. Avowedly in his criticism as in
his poetry, as he acknowledges in his preface to his
" Defendant," Mr. Chesterton is preaching a philo-
sophy, maintaining an attitude, announcing a creed.
We now possess in his collected works a consistent
volume of doctrine which can be contemplated as a
whole. Essays on " Chesterton as a religious teacher "
will soon be utilised at the older universities to stimulate
aspiring merit with mean monetary compensation. Before
this consummation arrives it is well that the immorality
of such a creed should be demonstrated.

173

BEFORE THE DAWN

With the side issues raised by Mr. Chesterton I am
altogether in sympathy. It is but the main contention
which is ultimately vicious. That Mr. Chesterton
should seek to defend the obsolete and neglected virtue
of Patriotism is a subject rather for praise than for
blame. That he should endeavour to arouse Kensing-
ton to consciousness of its proximity to the Eternal
fires should make for Kensington's righteousness if not
for Kensington's equanimity. That he should attempt
to interest the English people in the English Bible a
work much read by their forefathers is a commendable
if desperate enterprise. That he should hail himself as
God is only to be deprecated by some rival claimant to
the title. But that he should profess a blasphemous
contentment, associate pessimism with minor poetry,
and extol the average decent citizen for his average
decency, partakes of the nature of that sin for which
there is no place for repentance, though it be sought
bitterly and with tears.

" I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity,"
announces Mr. Chesterton, " and found a treasure in all
of them." No one doubts the treasure in the dust-
heap. The difficulty lies in the apprehension of the
treasure in the drawing-room. The jewel is manifest
in that which humanity discards. It is less discernible
in that which humanity retains. Mr. Chesterton holds
that all dross can be converted into gold by the believing
mind. Nothing is either good or bad, he would say
with the Danish optimist, but thinking makes it so.
Assert in firm tones that all things are very good, and,
lo ! all things are very good. It is a simple creed, and
yet pleasant when one considers it. In the spirit of his
capering maniac Mr. Chesterton traverses the world
charging himself everywhere with contentment and

174

THE BLASPHEMY OF OPTIMISM

triumph. A drunken man reels out of the beerhouse,
zigzags heavily down the pavement, clutches wildly
at vacuity, and flops into the garbage of the gutter.
To himself he is a mass of internal discomfort, a
dulled vacancy, and the earth an unkind stepmother
springing up to knock him down. To Mr. Chesterton,
observant, he is the living representative of the happy
peasant, the modern pastoral idyll, and his soul is with
the stars. The good citizen is journeying through
the tube, portly, double-chinned, reading Bright Bits
and breathing heavily. Should he but spring upwards,
Mr. Chesterton holds, prance wildly down the carriage
and spin round like a Dervish, he would inaugurate the
golden age. Surbiton is a city of mystery and enchant-
ment, Penge and Poplar suggest a restored fairyland,
Wapping is the antechamber to the Kingdom of Heaven.
All perspective is levelled in such a dreary morass of
satisfaction. Mr. Chesterton is convinced that the
Devil is dead. A children's epileptic hospital, a City
dinner, a political "At Home," a South African
charnel camp, or other similar examples of cosmic
ruin fail to shake this blasphemous optimism. At the
least he would design to make the Author of Evil die of
chagrin at persistent neglect, or perish from the reple-
tion of persistent flattery. The scheme is attractive
but delusive. That ancient strategist has seen so many
Chestertons flare and fade that he is unlikely to be
entrapped by such naive methods. Nor will the in-
clusion of good and evil in a higher synthesis,
embracing both in a universal approbation, create
any permanent or lasting peace in the war which is
being everlastingly waged on earth, as in heaven.

Progress has never been effected but by persistent
toil and the emphatic demonstration of the wicked-

175

BEFORE THE DAWN

ness and sorrow of the world. Mr. Chesterton's
creed will act as a disintegrating force upon the never
very secure foundations of this edifice. He will not,
indeed, be able to convince a man that his own tooth-
ache is good ; but he may succeed with alacrity in
assuring him of the sanctity and desirableness of the
toothache of others. Here is a citizen who presents at
times a singular combination of the hog and the hyena,
with the seed of a god stifled beneath deep rolls
of avidity and desire. All effort towards fructifica-
tion of this seed is effected only by the sudden
flashing into his face of some monstrous and un-
negligible wrong. Show him a cab-horse about to
trample on a child, and, at the cost of considerable
bodily discomfort, he will effect a rescue. Raise a
barrier of use and wont between him and the children
which he dully knows are perishing and he will consume
his dinner with withers unwnmg. A holocaust of four-
teen thousand children was demanded, with all the
incredible accompaniments of bereavement, loss, and
longing, before he realised in blear-eyed manner that
away in South Africa his clumsy hoof was crushing
something delicate and divine. Tell him that (say)
Bermondsey is a blasphemy of stunted, distorted
existence, outrage alike on God and man, and he
may be startled into the effort towards reform.
Tell him, as Mr. Chesterton tells him, that down
in Bermondsey the gas lamps are fairy bubbles, the
atmosphere is magical and charged with emotion, that
each fuddled toper is in Paradise beneath the approval
of the eternal stars ; with a deep content, thanking
God that he is rid of a knave, he turns him again to
slumber.

Mr. Chesterton holds that all things are very good.
176

THE BLASPHEMY OF OPTIMISM

He may assert that he has a certain reputable precedent
for such a statement. The plea cannot be entertained.
God found all things " very good." Such a discovery is
a prerogative of divinity. No man can look on God
and live ; and no man can live who sees things as God
sees them. Mr. Chesterton would urge us to believe
that each man's life is illuminated by the same light
which he himself discerns, though it were never on sea
or land. It is the pathetic fallacy, eternally untrue.
" The same sun shines on the windows of the alms-
house as on the walls of the castle." Never was there
a profounder delusion. The sun which shines on the
castle is not the sun that shines on the almshouse.
Contentment terminates in mortification. Complete
satisfaction is indistinguishable from death.

Mr. Chesterton, alive himself, would fain persuade us
that other men and women are alive. He assumes a
point which he would find it impossible to prove. Men
and women have been alive : there are intervals in the
career of the most obscure when they should be alive.
But the chief accusation against the modern city is
that it has choked so many innumerable human lives :
a mob moving who are dead. Compared with this
outrage, the massacre of actual assassination fades into
insignificance. At three periods, at least, humanity
should rise above the line of life. For a moment they
should live as children, in the world of fairyland peopled
by a strange and kindly race who pursue generous
action. For a moment they should live again when
through sudden, passionate, inexplicable emotion men
and women look into each other's eyes and realise their
kinship with the stars. And for a moment they should
live at death though the experience, it has been
noted, usually comes too late in life to be of much

177 N

practical utility. But in the life of the modern
crowd crushed into a mass of blurred humanity
these avenues of the spirit are choked and blighted.
Childhood is clumsily spoiled and broken by the mis-
placed ingenuity of the " Grown folk, mighty and
cunning." Courtship is the panting pursuit of Phyllis
by Strcphon round the block-dwellings, or the sombre,
nudging pilgrimage through a city of dreadful night.
And most men die with a grunt or a bleat, lamenting
the lack of gin, or protesting that they could drink
pea soup. We have never seen a man die, was
Thoreau's challenge; because we have never yet seen
a man alive.

Once man apprehended that God walked with him
in the garden in the cool of the day. Then he could
lift his eyes to the magical world about him and
Heaven's unchanging stars. Now the Archangel stands
at the entrance with the flaming sword in His hand;
attesting, on the one hand the effort needed for
return, on the other the futility of acquiescence in any
lesser aspiration. Mr. Chesterton would assuage the
divine hunger by the pretence that outside the wilder-
ness is fair. The man with the muck rake can obtain
the golden crown, not by the painful effort to look up-
wards, but by weaving the sticks of the floor into a
coronet and assuring himself that it is gold. Man has
wandered into the wilderness and solitary places. It is
well for him if here he finds no city to dwell in. Mr.
Chesterton would urge him to build booths of boughs,
assure him that Paradise is here or nowhere, expound
to him the grandeur of the desert scrub, and the glory
of the desert sand. Far on the horizon shines the
Land of Promise, demanding first for its attainment a
divine discontent and an eager pushing forward. Effort

178

THE BLASPHEMY OF OPTIMISM

unwearying, the sweat and blood of men, the wreck of
a thousand lives, a world travail of pain, has been the
price men have paid for permission sometimes to
whisper to each other in the twilight that all things
are very good. The ultimate tragedy of history, at
which the sun veiled his face and the pillars of the
earth were shaken, was necessary in order that humanity
might be able to cherish for nineteen disordered centuries
the desperate hope that God is Love.

179

CHICAGO AND FEANCIS

IN pursuit of my trade as a reviewer of books it befell
a while ago that I was reading two volumes deal-
ing with subjects of especial interest. The one was a
description, compiled with enthusiasm and pride, of the
triumphs of the New America. The other was a record,
a little sentimental, but very pleasant and simple, of
the lives of the followers of Francis. And the chance
combination of two such subjects set one a-thinking.
The new America exhibits a nation definitely
organised for one purpose, straining every nerve and
sinew to attain that end. "Business" is the all-
absorbing interest ; by the side of which nothing else
counts at all. The nation is joyously set on the com-
mercial conquest of the world. As in former times the
people organised throughout as a military race was
enabled to trample down all rivals, so in a commercial
age the people which has with devotion moulded every-
thing towards commercial energy is destined to crumple
up its less single-hearted competitors. The vision is
presented of a life where all other interests are ruth-
lessly planed away. In parallelogramed cities of
monotonous architecture, amid the shrieks of whistles
and the noise of telegraphs and monsterphones, a vague
impression appears of eager men in a crowd. They rise
hastily from sleep to rush from factory to counting-
ISO

CHICAGO AND FRANCIS

house, consuming meals in their shirt-sleeves and toiling
with a rude energy which is one of the wonders of the
modern world. Leisure, solitude, art, literature, medita-
tion, religion all these are brushed aside as by-pro-
ducts, apart from the main business of life. Socialism
has made less progress than in any other civilised
country : with each man possessing the marshal's baton
in his knapsack, why turn aside to raise all to the level
of lance-corporal ! High above the throng tower the
figures of those who have attained : a Jay Gould, a
Vanderbilt, a Carnegie, who started with the proverbial
penny. Such unified energy is producing its results.
Already the old nations, with their militarism and their
ideals, are feeling the commencement of the strain : the
cry has gone forth for a Europe united against the
common enemy the new Barbarians knocking at its
doors. But the flimsy barriers which such a Europe
can erect are destined to be swept aside. The figures
of commercial progress for even ten years in America are
something stupendous ; in steel, in oil, in pig, in cotton,
the output springs upward in a night. For the moment
there is respite while the internal markets absorb the
energies of the factories; but in a few years' time
America will once more leap forward to the commercial
exploitation of the world. In the perfect adaptation of
means to an end and the throwing over as lumber of all
that does not subserve that end she stands unrivalled.
We bow to our future conquerors.

America is changing beneath our very eyes. Yester-
day's books concerning her are antiquated ; descriptions
of ten years ago are hopelessly out of date ; between the
writing of a book and its publication half its facts have
changed. Yet the New America still awaits its inter-
preter. What exactly is the meaning of the events

181

BEFORE THE DAWN

daily recorded ; not in terms of oil or pig, but in their
inner and larger meaning ? What is the significance,
i.e., of the vast system of popular colleges in the cities
of the Mississippi Valley ? What contribution to
human welfare is provided by (say) Athens, Georgia ?
What exact function in the spiritual progress of man-
kind is performed by the Sixth Methodist Episcopal
Church of Minneapolis ? These are the kind of problems
upon which we seek light.

American civilisation has " come to centre about the
conception of life as a matter of industrial energy."
With rude strength, utter devotion, and boisterous
energy, the American capitalist and worker have com-
bined in alliance for the commercial exploitation of the
world. Life itself vanishes in the terrific elaboration
of the giant machine. In America there are " two
kinds of slaves, the nigger and the white." Youth
is everywhere evident. " Under the new strenuous
regime there are no old men." Men as well as machines
are thrown with reckless disregard to the scrap-heap.
"America is paying more for her industrial success
than we would care to pay ; more, indeed, than humanity
can afford." The women alone live. While these read
books, discuss art, or pilgrimage through Europe, the
men, in the midst of the shrieks of whistles and the
clang of machinery, provide a panorama of a stampede
from counting-house to factory, wolfing up meals of
oyster-stew in an atmosphere of perpetual dyspepsia.

"Where are all your old men ? " asks the visitor as
he gazes at young, tired faces everywhere. " Come up
to the cemetery and I will show you," is the genial
reply.

The Spanish war marked a deep-cut moment of
change ; and the American nation is still intoxicated

182

CHICAGO AND FRANCIS

by the ease with which it crumpled up an historic military
power. To the other nations of the world its entrance
into Welt-politik has been like a descent of a brigade
from the planet Mars, wielding a force singularly potent,
absolutely new, and not quite accountable. The result
has left the American people, on the one hand, with the
legacy of great possessions : "an American Empire is
arising." Forgetting their greatest President's dictum
that "the Almighty never made a people good enough
to rule over other people," stimulated by the alluring
claptrap concerning the White Man's Burden and the
Trustees of Progress, with the unlimited possibilities
of trade exploitation that "expansion " always provides,
they have set themselves to the task of elevating the
Philippines and Cuba to the civilisation of Chicago.
And on the other hand, with the taste for blood once
whetted, their appetite for large interventions has been
aroused. So they lecture Roumania on its treatment of
the Jews, consider the possibility of intervention in
Turkey, and elaborate a Navy for fresh conquests. In
a few years the lectures are destined to find their fruit
in action : and with that action the Coming Race enters
into its heritage.

Turn from this vision of the complacent, shouting
twentieth century to the pictures of the influence of an
ideal in that strange Europe of seven centuries ago.
Life is rude and troubled. Wars and brutalities abound,
the Empire and the Church are fighting for a world
mastery ; wolves, as in Salimbene's picture of the
miseries of the time, howl under the walls of the
little cities of Italy and at night enter the towns and
devour men. There is little comfort and no content.
Life has not yet come to revolve round an economic

183

BEFORE THE DAWN

centre. But in all the chaos of a world but imperfectly
comprehended, full of fear and strange adventure, there
are interests leading to high spiritual endeavour and the
triumph of the soul. The wonder is not in the unique
and gracious figure of Francis. This, indeed, is a
miracle. But similar if less complete miracles abound
in the history of Christendom. But it lies in the spirit
of the sons of Francis : in that madness from beyond
the boundaries of the world, which fell upon so many
quite ordinary men, merchants, soldiers, citizens, who
in this century might have served a Beef Trust or
engineered a corner in wheat. After twelve hundred
years, attempts had again been made faithfully to follow
the life of the Master. The living example of the
Christian life had once more proved its appealing power.
And the thirteenth century recognises for a moment at
least the key to the secret of the transitory life of man.
By the end the spiritual impulse is fading into the light
of common day ; the followers of Holy Poverty are
becoming less faithful in their allegiance. But even at
the end, a hundred years after the Blessed Francis, the
new Art is drawing all its inspiration from his life and
teaching. Dante is proclaiming the greatness of the
Franciscan ideal ; and such a miracle can happen as
that strange pilgrimage of kings and cardinals to the
mountains, to bring down from his refuge amongst the
clouds a hermit who in a moment of madness or
inspiration had been elected to the proudest position in
the world, to inaugurate the golden age.

Haunting the whole of this tumultuous and fascinat-
ing time is the ideal of the Great Restoration : the
sense of impending change in that visible revelation of
the Kingdom of God to which the best minds turned
with the eager longing of children. The third Kingdom,

184

CHICAGO AND FRANCIS

the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit, was about to dawn.
To-day, or at furthest to-morrow, the Angel of the
Everlasting Gospel would proclaim the entrance of the
armies of God.

They are a fascinating company these children of
Francis, the members of the new order of spiritual
chivalry enrolled in the service of their Lady Poverty.
First are those who were with him, Nos qui cum eo
fuimus, possessing some infection as it were of the
altogether personal charm that surrounds the little poor
man of Assisi. Bernard, who had loved him so, died
protesting " I feel in my soul that for a thousand worlds
I would not have been other than a servant of Christ.
Hear my prayer, that ye love one another." Eufino
nursed him at the end. Giles in his high perch at
Perugia spoke his rough words of common sense and saw
visions of eternal things. Masseo's life was broken by
the death of his master. Leo, the pecorello di Dio, the
little sheep of God, so humble and patient, could kindle
into fierce anger at the violation of the rule in the
building of the great Church of San Francesco, the
wonder of the world. And after these came the long
succession of those who gladly took up the torch from
the first followers, rejoicing in the revelation of the
secret. In front are a few selected figures : Salim-
bene, the kind-hearted gossip and traveller, in whose
Chronicles lives all the life of the mediaeval world;
or John of Parma, the great General of the order,
journeying on foot from house to house along the roads
of Europe, taking the humblest place and the meanest
duties at his visitations, as befits the greatest in
this stronge reversal of human standards : in the
banqueting-hall of the king found amongst the tables of
the poor. The strangest, most attractive figure is

185

Jacopone da Todi, with his austerities and his joyous-
ness ; his tender songs over the Christ Child and his
poetry, through which breathes the open air and all
the hot, coloured life of Southern Italy : " sun and sky
and flowing water and flower-lined roads." Visions of
unimaginable sweetness attend him in his prison ; the
End in Good unimagined and measureless Light is ever
before him ; he weeps " because love is not loved " and
" would fain have suffered for the demons in hell and
have seen them go before him into Paradise." At his
death " it was believed," says the chronicler, "by those
standing near that he died, not so much conquered by
his malady, though that was grave, as from an extra-
ordinary excess of love." And behind these greater
figures is a multitude ol forgotten common people
who have caught fire at the message and whose life has
become transformed ; as those who set out to convert the
Mohammedans, or the Friars that came joyfully singing
into Stynkynge Alley in the city of London in Eng-
land, or the obscure and shadowy figures who are
discerned tending the lepers or following the track of
the great armies to nurse the wounded and bury the
dead.

Later there is conflict between the strict and the
relaxed ; the world rolls in again and stifles the ideal ;
and the faithful retire to the mountains with gloomy
prophecies of ruin to become the soured and bitter
Fraticelli of the fourteenth century. But in this early
time the vision seemed not far away. There is a strange
reason, a kind of disordered common sense, an unanswer-
able and rather distressing logic, subversive of the
respectabilities and the gospel of success about these
followers of Madonna Poverty. Here are none of the
austerities and contempt of the world, the pitiless

186

CHICAGO AND FRANCIS

laceration of the body of an earlier and gloomier time.
Though pilgrims and strangers, seeking a country, they
go singing through a land which for them is very fair.
They love all natural things the unclouded sky and the
hot nights of Umbria. Lacking all possessions they are
full of song in praise of God. They love all men and
women, are passionately affectionate one to another.
They are cheered by the abiding vision of the un-
seen world. Life when released from the intolerable
burden of possessions they proclaim as very good.
There is a blitheness here, somehow vanished from the
modern manufacturing city ; an absurd satisfaction in
the picture of the world as a cloister lacking in the more
up-to-date picture of the world as a factory.

And despite the changes of the intervening years, how
singularly contemporary is their appeal ! The Sacrum
Commercium Beati Francisci cum Domina Paupertate,
the prose version of Giotto's picture in the lower Church
at Assisi in its eloquence and shrewdness the summary
of the whole spirit of the Franciscan revival might
have been written yesterday. St. Francis in his quest
for Holy Poverty will go to the great ones and to the
learned sages. This he did. But the great ones and
the sages answered him hardly, saying, " What new
doctrine is this thou bringest to our ears ? Let the
Poverty thou seekest be thine and thy children's after
thee. For us be the enjoyment of delight and the over-
flowing of riches. For brief and full of labour are the
days of our life and in the end of man what refuge ?
Nothing better have we found than to eat and drink and
be merry while we live." And the temptation of
Avarice, determining to take unto her the name
Prudence and speaking humble wise, might have been
delivered by any ecclesiastical dignity explaining the

187

BEFORE THE DAWN

" twentieth century spirit of Francis " in Sabatier
meetings.

" With all peace and quietness you can work your own
salvation and others, if once your storehouse be full. . . .
Will God not accept you if you have wherewith to
give to the needy and are mindful of the poor? . . .
What fear for you in the contact of riches, since ye hold
them as nothing? Evil is not in things but in the mind
for God saw everything that He had made and behold
it was very good. So to the good all things are good.
... how many rich men spend foolishly, whereas,
if you had wealth you would turn it to good use : for
your purpose is holy and holy your desire."

An appealing vision was needed to combat a tempta-
tion so subtle and plausible. It was found in the vision
of that Lady Poverty as Giotto painted her who " alone
clave to the King of Glory when all His chosen and
loved ones left Him in fear."

" I am not rude and unlearned, as many think; but
ancient and full of days as I am, I know the nature of
things, the variety of creatures, and the changes of the
times. I have known the restlessness of the human
heart, learning it now in my experience of the world,
now by subtlety of nature and now by gift of grace. I
was in the Paradise of God when man was naked,
wandering through all that spacious realm fearing
nothing. . . . There I thought to remain for ever. . . .
Very joyful was I, sporting with him all the day, having
nothing of my own, for all was God's."

Back one is driven to the old haunting question.
Which of these have attained the real secret of success
these visionaries of Umbria long dead, or the solid live
men who have made Chicago ? those who get, or those

188

CHICAGO AND FRANCIS

who give ? Truly if they were right then the modern
world is altogether wrong. A modern novelist, M. de
Coulevain, has attempted to represent the conflict of
these ideals the product of modern America in its most
cultured and effective form with this dream world of the
past. His heroine visiting Assisi only expresses regret
that St. Francis and St. Claire never married. The
language of the Saints towards the real things of the
Eternal world is uncouth and alien to her. "There will
never be any saints in America," she confidently
asserts.

"No! No! I don't see an American divesting himself
of his goods, preaching poverty and talking to doves.
Instead of St. Francis we shall, may he, have men who
will lessen poverty and make the world a more com-
fortable place."

Wealth accumulated as a reality, wealth distributed as
an ideal here is the watchword of the spirit of the age.
It may seem madness to cling to any divergent dream.
Yet a certain suspicion still refuses to be stifled. " What
shall it profit?" appears at times written large over all
the monstrous buildings and shrieking factories. For
long after Chicago and Birmingham and all the products
of a complacent and mechanical age have become the
habitation of bats and owls, men's hearts will still turn
with longing towards the little brown cities of Italy,
for love of those lives whose fragrance clings to their
crumbling walls and appeals across the silence of so
many dead centuries.

189

THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN

MR. WELLS and Mr. Bernard Shaw are our
two living prophets. Both have entered the
profession, like the shepherd of Tekoa, by unorthodox
ways. Both interpret the function of prophecy as much
in the diagnosis of the present as in the forecast of the
changes of the future. Both follow the New Testament
in preferring the wicked to the mean. Both have faith
in nothing but youth. "Every man of forty is a
scoundrel " is the cheerful aphorism of the one ; and the
other appeals always to the young men to enrol in the
crusade for the New Republic. They survey the squalid
course of contemporary life in England, from the cottage
to the castle, with a kind of disgusted pity. They find
in the life of the average Briton, his complacency, his
dull pretence of wisdom, his dull thirst for gain, the
random routine of his unedifying day, something which
cries to heaven as an offence. Both call for the Super-
man. But in the case of the one the call remains as a
pious aspiration, a mere summary of revolt and weari-
ness. In the other there is an attempt to ransack the
springs of action, to drive down into fundamental things,
to examine how, if at all, it is possible by breeding, by
education, by social reconstruction to hasten the arrival
of the Coming Race.

190

THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN

A figure famous in the literature of Europe has also in
these later years joined the prophetic company. M.
Maeterlinck has progressed steadily from the method
and atmosphere of a dead past, through the wisdom and
destiny of the present, to the proclamation of his faith
in the future. Examination of three writers of such
varied talent and temperament should throw some light
upon the problem of the days to come.

Mr. Bernard Shaw, in his latest plays, reveals the
attitude of revolt. He is tired of the tedious inepti-
tude, of the persistent muddle of life. It is the man of
forty ; disenchanted ; the mocking spirit confronting
existence with a grimace and a gibe. All the earlier
illusions have vanished. The ideals of the time which
he would term the " eighteen-eighties " have passed like
a dream. He sees life in its grim and ugly naked-
ness, and he is filled with a hopeless disgust at the
prospect. With one of his own characters he has
"swallowed all the formulas, even that of Socialism,"
and found that he has eaten the east wind. The
work of dramatic criticism commenced the process ; the
completion was attained in experience as a Borough
Councillor of St. Pancras. He heaps scorn upon pro-
gress, sentiment, all effort to regenerate the world.
The foolishness and vapidness of the upper classes,
the "cricketers to whom age brings golf instead of
wisdom"; the bourgeois with their respectability and
their unclean reticence, the swinish multitude who are
content to have it so all are equally repulsive. The
method of the Fabian Society and the method of the
Barricade are both "fundamentally futile." "Enough,"

191

BEFORE THE DAWN

he cries, " of this goose cackle about Progress ; man as
he is never will nor can add a cubit to his stature by any
of its quackeries, political, scientific, educational, religious,
or artistic." There is merely an illusion of bustling
activity ; no real advance. " I do not know whether you
have any illusions left," he writes to "My dear Walkley,"
" on the subject of education, progress, and so forth. I
have none." The world to him, as, he gravely announces,
it was to Shakespeare, is " a great stage of fools, on
which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort
of sense in living in it at all." Vanitas vanitatum, omnia
vanitas. He turns round and roars with laughter at the
absurdity of it all ; the blindness of the little toiling race
of men to the stupidity of its aspirations and the fatuity
of its efforts. Like Gilbert's jester, when he has nothing
else to laugh at, he laughs at himself till he aches for it.
In the words of one of his characters in "John Bull's
Other Island," he finds no jest so diverting as that of
telling the truth. " The world will not bear thinking of
to those who know what it is" is the burden of his cry.
Huxley was prepared to hail a "kindly comet" which
would sweep the whole affair away as a kindly consumma-
tion. But since, in Mr. Bernard Shaw's pleasant words,
" the revival of tribal soothsaying and idolatrous rites,
which Huxley called Science and mistook for an advance
on the Pentateuch," Nietzsche, with the gospel of the
Superman, has shown a more excellent way. Mr. Shaw
calls for the elimination of the Yahoo and the breeding
of the Superman.

In " Man and Superman," and " John Bull's
Other Island," he has expressed in his own un-
equalled fashion this bedrock scorn of life. In " Man
and Superman" the old illusions and the new fret and
strut their hour upon the stage. Here are Roderick

192

THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN

Roebuck, of the eighteen-sixties, with his portraits of
John Bright, Herbert Spencer, and Martineau, and his
autotypes of allegories of Mr. G. F. Watts ; Mr. John
Tanner, M.I.R.C. (Member of the Idle Rich Class),
author of the Revolutionists' Handbook ; Anne, a "Vital
Genius," representing " the Life Force " ; Hector
Malone, an Eastern American, distinguished by " the
engaging freshness of his personality and the dum-
foundering staleness of his culture." The " new man "
the " man of the future " is represented by one of
Mr. Wells' s engineers, Straker, the chauffeur, educated
at a Board School and a Polytechnic, of a brilliant
and engaging vulgarity. Behind this company is the
machinery which pulls the strings and decides the
issue. In a dialogue between the Devil, Mozart's
original Don Juan, Anne, and the statue of her father,
a temporary visitant from heaven, is revealed the gospel
of Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and Shaw.

Briefly, this is the futility of all things except the
blind but persistent purposes of Nature which subtly
checkmate the plans of the individual for happiness or
suicide, and direct all things towards the perpetuation
of the race and the coming of the Superman. The Devil
who had left heaven because he was bored represents
the disillusioned spirit. " In the arts of life," he says,
" man invents nothing ; but in the arts of death he
outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and
machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and
famine." " The power that governs the earth is not
the power of Life, but of Death." Each generation
thinks the world is progressing because it is always
moving. " Where you now see reform, progress, fulfil-
ment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on
the stepping-stones of his dead self to higher things,

193

BEFORE THE DAWN

you will see nothing but an infinite comedy ol
illusion."

To this Don Juan opposes his exaltation of Life,
"the force that ever strives to attain greater power of
contemplating itself." Against the citizen with his
abject respectabilities and negations he uplifts the
fanatic. He sings " Not arms and the hero, but the
philosophic man." " Of all other sorts of men I
declare myself tired. They are tedious failures." He
sees modern pleasure-loving society dancing gaily to
sterility. But he is confident in the victory of the Life
Force, when " the plain-spoken marriage services of the
Church will no longer be abbreviated, and half-suppressed
as indelicate." With the expunging of the "unbear-
able frivolities" of the "romantic vo wings and pledg-
ings and until-death-do-us-partings," the real purpose
of marriage will be honoured and accepted. The Devil
gloomily promises a future of disillusionment and
credulity. The Life Force will thrust mankind " into
religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to
save their souls from me ; then it will drive you from
religion into science, where you will snatch the babies
from the water sprinkling, and inoculate them with
disease to save them from catching it acciden-
tally" ; then to politics, and other dusty and lamentable
things. But Don Juan is persistent, and while the
Devil deplores his failure with the Life worshippers,
departs to heaven, of which a characteristic picture is
given :

" At every one of these concerts in England you will
find rows of weary people who are there not because
they really like classical music, but because they think
they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in
heaven. A number of people sit there in glory not

194

THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN

because they are happy, but because they think they
owe it to their position to be in [heaven. They are
almost all English."

The scene ends upon the earthly stage. Anne, the
Vital Genius, stalks and captures her prey. Tanner
recognises that " the trap was laid from the beginning
by the Life Force," and yields while shouting his
protests, and protesting that he would prefer to be
hanged. He is gravely congratulated by the leader of
the brigands. " Sir," says Madoza, " there are two
tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire.
The other is to get it. Mine and yours, sir." And
the curtain falls upon " universal laughter."

"Violet (with intense conviction): You are a brute,
Jack.

" Ann (looking at him with fond pride and caressing
his arm) : Never mind her, dear. Go on talking.

"Tanner: Talking!

" Universal laughter."

" Universal laughter " is also the note of " John
Boll's Other Island," and laughter that has no mirth
in it, the only alternative to tears. The " anglicised
Irishman" substitutes science for sentiment, and daily
loathes himself more profoundly. The " Gladstonised
Englishman " attains his heart's desire without ever
apprehending the emptiness and foolishness of the
figure he cuts in the sight of God. Heaven is
once more pictured as a place of boredom and blue
satin, mainly peopled by the English. Imagination
curses one man, lack of it another. The peasant,
freed, sets himself to squeeze the labourer. All are
bought by flattery, which they know to be flattery, and
yet accept joyfully. The dreamer who feels pity for all
life is universally proclaimed as a madman. The world

195

BEFORE THE DAWN

worshipping efficiency is announced as creating effi-
ciently the machinery of labour and the machinery of
pleasure, all turning to dust. Hotels, golf-links, land-
purchase, membership of Parliament, ideals, desires,
dreams this is the end of every man's desire. The
eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with
hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which
shall be, and there is no new thing under the sun.
That which is crooked cannot be made straight, and
that which is wanting cannot be numbered. " I have
seen all the works that are done under the sun, and
behold all is vanity and vexation of spirit."

Mr. Bernard Shaw sees the world a den of dangerous
animals, amongst whom our few accidental supermen
must live as precariously as tamers do, " taking the
humour of their situation and the dignity of their
superiority as a set-off to the horror of the one and the
loneliness of the other." His cry for the Superman is
little more than the cutting of a stick with which to
emphasise the ultimate impossibility of the finite life of
man. Amidst his world of supermen, undoubtedly one
rebel against the common superiority would be Mr.
Bernard Shaw, convicted of a horror and loneliness all
the more real because there would be less obvious
material for his pleasant and bitter discontents.

II

The stones of Mr. Wells have thinly veiled, under
the guise of scientific romance, an impeachment of pre-
sent things. In the history of the " Sleeper " he shows
in the future all the forces of the present ten times
multiplied more noise, more confusion, more wealth,
more poverty, more separation from nature, more blind-

196

THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN

ness to aught but material things. Society has again
passed into the condition of the later days of Rome,
when, having attained an end and with nothing to
anticipate, the springs of action have been choked
with a world weariness. Later, however, in "Anticipa-
tions," and " Mankind in the Making," and a " New
Utopia," he has attempted a saner estimate of actual
possibilities. The forces of life are estimated, as well
as the forces of death : the revolt from the present and
its unclean poverty and routine, the mess that man is
making of life, becomes itself a guarantee that effort
will be directed towards a better existence for our
children's children.

Mr. Wells is a master of the suggestive phrase which
suddenly opens great issues. He pictures the student
of divinity to-day coming " into a world futt of the
ironical silences that follow great controversies." There
is a whole universe in that single phrase. " To state
these questions," he says of the Republican ideal, "is
like opening the door of a room that has long been
locked and deserted. One has a lonely feeling." Many
a man with a youthful dream of noble things " peers
to-day from between preposterous lawn sleeves or under
a tilted coronet, sucked as dry of his essential honour
as a spider sucks a fly." In his discussion of the sex
question a sane and clean discussion of one of the
most baffling of human problems he sees common
human nature with a really dreadful insight. "I had
purported to call this paper ' Sex and the Imagination,' "
he says, " and then I had a sudden vision of the thing
that happens. The vision presented a casual reader
seated in a library turning over books and magazines, and
casting much excellent wisdom aside, and then suddenly,
as it were, waking up at that title, arrested, displaying a

197

BEFORE THE DAWN

furtive alertness, reading, flushed and eager, nosing
through the article."

By such unflinching observation of the facts of the
world around him does Mr. Wells justify his claim to
preach the gospel of the New Republic of the Super-
man.

" Call ye that a Society," cried Carlyle seventy years
ago, " where there is no longer any Social Idea extant ? "
" One writes 'our present civilisation,' " re-echoes Mr.
Wells to-day, " and of previous civilisations, but,
indeed, no civilisations have yet really come into
existence." With a kind of smooth and polished
bitterness, Mr. Wells heaps up his indictment of
the men of his time. It is all a little cruel ; too
detached to be entirely pleasant : the author surveys
the scrambling horde as the observer surveys the ant-
heap or the locust crowd with a cold resentment and
contempt. He has known something of the foulness of
the struggle. He has been near to be himself suffocated
in the swarm. He has escaped with no illusions con-
cerning the heroism and loveliness of the average citizen
of the Imperial race. All his onslaught could be summed
up in a single challenge. Stand in the street of any
modern English city and watch the stream drift by of
shuffling, shabby bodies, of dissatisfied or vacuous
minds. Or contrast in thought the ox-like seriousness
over trivial things, the compromise and gross living of
the prosperous middle-class citizen and his wife, with
the vision of their radiant childhood. Mr. Lowes
Dickinson has summed up his fundamental dissatis-
faction with life in a picture of the active and graceful
lambs transmuted by time into the stolid and silly
sheep. It is to-day's progress of mankind. And the
play of malign forces upon these beautiful children,

198

THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN

with their possibilities of rational and refined existence,
points all the sombre warnings of the message of this
modern prophet.

His purpose is to seek for remedy. He has been
compelled to rule out, though with reluctance, a method
that would appear easy and pleasant. Why cannot we
artificially " breed " the Superman as we breed strong
horses or fat cattle ? Because, in part, of our ignorance
of the subtle laws of inheritance and the strange sports
and variations it produces. Because, again, our Super-
men will be different the one from the other, will em-
brace a combination of qualities, so that even in the
case of mere superficial physical beauty it is quite im-
possible to choose a particular pair to produce a particular
type in the second generation. And, above all, because
it is the abnormal and the variation which are most
useful to mankind : the genius trembling on the border
of insanity, often flowering on a tainted stock ; the fiery
mind of a Stevenson or a Henley pent up in a diseased
or battered body ; the eccentric distortion of the saint or
the hero. You can breed out, but you cannot breed in.
You could conceivably eliminate all lopsided personality
and produce a gross acreage of decent citizen. But the
result would be a kind of a nightmare of the mediocre,
a universal Brixton.

At the conclusion of the record of Mr. Lewisham's
somewhat squalid life history, his creator discloses a
sudden illumination almost in the form of a revelation.
The coming of the Child, with all its possibilities,
reaching down to endless generations, takes this shabby
little clerk from the cramped surroundings of his
personal life, and gives him somehow a pathetic but
real dignity as the steward of the heritage of all the
future. In his later social appeals Mr. Wells attempts

199

BEFORE THE DAWN

to awaken in his readers some thrill of the same
emotion. In a whimsical picture he presents " all our
statesmen, our philanthropists, our public men, gathered
into one great hall," and regarding perplexedly "a huge
spout that no man can stop," discharging " abahy every
eight seconds." " Our success or failure with that
unending stream of babies is the measure of our
civilisation." As in the dream of a great novelist, he
sees the might have been, the fair vision of an ideal
of individual life which will never be realised, con-
trasted with the mean and pitiful reality ; and with
something of the fervour of a Hebrew prophet, he
confronts the men of his time with the inquiry, Why
these things should be ?

" With a weak and wailing outcry, that stirs the
heart, the creature comes protesting into the world."
Already it is handicapped by ancestral sins and scars of
body and mind. But from the first we increase that
handicap, according to Mr. Wells, with our selfishness,
our clumsiness, and our ignorance. First we slay an
enormous proportion by preventable squalor and disease.
The statistics of infant mortality reveal a holocaust
of children, a " perennial massacre of the innocents "
161 children out of 1,000 in Lancashire which is alone
evidence of the survival of barbaric conditions. In one
of the few passages in which the author has allowed
his feeling to emerge from beneath the polished and
scornful invective of his denunciation, Mr. Wells
arraigns society in the name of these murdered children :
" stiff little life-soiled sacrifices to the spirit of disorder
against which it is man's pre-eminent duty to battle."
Our civilisation has neither the courage to kill them
outright, painlessly, nor the heart to give them what
they need.

200

THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN

" There has been all the pain in their lives, there has
been the radiated pain of their misery, there has been
the waste of their grudged and insufficient food, and all
the pain and labour of their mothers, and all the
world is sadder for them because they have lived in
vain."

But those who have run the gauntlet of this hazardous
infancy are in hardly a better plight. Mr. Wells shows
by tables and statistics the far falling away, which is
the destiny of the children of the poor, from any
reasonable standard of physical development The con-
sequences endure the fruit of bad feeding, mothers
" battered and exhausted with child-bearing ; insanitary,
ugly, inconvenient homes ; absence of fresh air and sun-
light." These figures " serve to suggest, but they do
not serve to gauge, the far graver and sadder loss, the
invisible and immeasurable loss through mental and
moral qualities undeveloped, through activities warped
and crippled and vitality and courage lowered."

But the child grows ; reason awakens the imitative
faculties, the beginnings of will. In Mr. Wells's in-
dictment of the cunning grown folk everywhere these
are waiting for him : with bludgeons and clubs, with
pitfalls dug for his unwary feet, with the grosser
cruelty of their kindness. We begin by using the
child as a plaything for ourselves : giving him foolish
toys that he may be amused, talking "baby language "
to him because it causes us vague satisfaction. As he
grows older, we infect him with our mean compromises
and shabby virtues. We rear him in the terrible sham
genteel homes of the middle classes, which the author
describes with a kind of cold fury. " A raging father,
a scared, deceitful mother, vulgarly acting, vulgarly
thinking friends, all leave an almost indelible impress."

201

BEFORE THE DAWN

Then comes education. Of all Mr. Wells's hatreds the
dreary farce we term middle-class education perhaps
occupies the supreme position. With no thought-out
plan, with a thousand inherited shams and inconsis-
tencies, with an unctuous boast of moral influence
and the teaching of a religion which we do not our-
selves believe, we thrust the developing soul through
the period of awakening passion. Some collapse and
go under. Some hold on and develop into the kind of
creatures of compromise which make up the horde
of average men and women. It is all wrong all
fundamentally wrong. The child, with all its infinite
possibilities, has become even as one of us: a "suburban
white nigger," with a thousand a year and the " conceit
of Imperial destinies " ; or full of " the haughty in-
capacity, the mean pride, the parasitic lordliness of the
just-independent, well-connected English."

It is a sombre picture of the raw disorder and mean-
ness of average English life. The kind of picture when
painted half a century ago by John Ruskin or Matthew
Arnold, left English readers speechless with furious
amazement. The men of to-day, with a less good
conceit of themselves, will possibly receive it with a
gloomy acquiescence. By the side of the " clean and
beautiful child " Mr. Wells places in cruel contrast
" the mean and graceless creature of our modern life,
his ill-made clothes ; his clumsy, half-fearful, half-
brutal bearing ; his coarse, defective speech ; his dreary,
unintelligent work; his shabby, impossible, bathless,
artless home." The author lifts the curtain for a
moment on some phase of this creature's typical
activity, "enjoying himself" on a Bank Holiday, or
"rejoicing, peacock feather in hand, hat askew," on
"the defeat of a numerically inferior enemy." The

202

THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN

conversion of the one into the other he upholds as the
persistent tragedy of modern life.

No discriminating observer can contemplate the
particular type of civilisation, or the lack of it, which is
developing in Anglo-Saxon communities without pro-
found disquietude. " He gave them their heart's
desire, and sent leanness withal into their souls,"
might be written over all the vast material success and
the fundamental spiritual poverty of the dominant race.
Mr. Wells, passing to his remedy for these discontents,
has found a less eager following. The astonishment
and rather poor humour which have been evoked by the
sweeping nature of his suggestions may indeed be put
aside. Such criticism is merely the result of a lack of
imaginative foresight. No social system could ever be
more entirely incredible than the social system of the
present day, if explained on paper to the denizens of
another world. No possible changes in the immediate
future could ever be more revolutionary and profound
than have been the changes of the immediate past.
A Government, by an adapted jury system, replacing
the universal democracy ; the State subsidy to selected
authors and critics ; the development of the " New
Republic " ; the deliberate attack on the problem of
poverty and low-grade life ; the large reorganisations of
education all these which, to the dull mind, appear
but fantastic dreams, will certainly be paralleled by
equally disturbing changes before the century has
closed.

It is rather in his fundamental theory of life and of
human well-being that one would join issue with this
acute critic. He believes, as ardently as the newer
Fabians, in efficiency, that latest of the cries which
Mr. Shaw covers with the violence of his scorn. He

203

BEFORE THE DAWN

has a really remarkable faith in the power of revised
organisation and government to modify the life of man.
Strangely enough for such a shrewd observer of the
tragic comedy of human affairs, he appears still to
believe that the intellect, the human reason, counts for
much in human progress ; that men may be reasoned
into sanity, cleanliness, order, and an ardour for all
excellent things. Whole pages of his books burn
with the same generous fire as that possessed by the
eighteenth-century French writers, or the English re-
formers of the early Victorian school. The vast catas-
trophe of the revolution in the one case, the prolonged
sunset of hope deferred in the other, emphasised a
lesson which humanity is always being compelled to
re-learn : that as the razor to the granite rocks or the
mooring thread of silk to the vessel, so is human intel-
lect and reason confronting " those two giants, the
passion and the pride of man."

This pleasant intellectual enthusiasm extends even to
free libraries, towards which Mr. Wells exhibits a
devotion shared, one would think, by no one but the
admirable Mr. Carnegie. " Give books," he cries with
fervour ; diffuse useful knowledge ; increase " the
amount of intellectual activity in the State." "Thought
is the life of a community." " For three thousand
years and more the book has become more and more
the evident salvation of man."

He has failed to realise the practical difficulties of
amelioration and reform when the people, as a whole,
are content to have things otherwise. He demands, for
example, a " minimum standard of soundness and sani-
tation " for houses and " legislation against overcrowd-
ing." We have such minimum standard at present,
and such legislation ; but the law is a dead letter. It

204

THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN

is no one's interest to put it into force : it lies undis-
turbed on dusty shelves. He assails again our present
system of treating the children of vicious and drunken
parents : using " the quivering, damaged victim " as our
instrument for punishment of the parent. He would
take the child away to an institution (though, as he
wisely recognises in another place, these " institu-
tions " are hut " aspects of failure "), and dehit the cost
on the parent. The system is at present at work in the
industrial schools. There is a continuous pressure
on the part of undesirable parents to get rid of their
children. But, as every poor-law guardian knows, the
parent very shortly skips off and is lost in the crowd of
the city, leaving the State to rear its ill-fated offspring.
Nothing hut a German system of classification and
registration could overcome this difficulty. But, in
fact, as Mr. Wells recognises in his revised scheme
of Government by Juries, we are faced, not as the
prejudiced assert, with a breakdown in Democratic
Government, but with a breakdown in all Government.
You call for a Dictator, you organise a central Execu-
tive, and you get the English War Office. You
delegate authority and create local interest, and the
result is the London Borough Council. It is a kind
of deliquescence of character and responsibility. " The
National energy is falling away." " Our workmen take
no pride in their work any longer ; they shirk toil and
gamble. And, what is worse, the master takes no pride
in his work ; he, too, shirks toil and gambles." In his
onslaught upon philanthropic institutions Mr. Wells
indicates the truth. " They do not work " is his severe
but just summary. " In cold fact it is impossible to get
enough capable and devoted people to do the work."
"Able, courageous, vigorous people are rare, and the

205

BEFORE THE DAWN

world urges a thousand better employments upon them."
It is the creation of "able, courageous, vigorous people"
which is the crying need of the modern world ; with sim-
plicity, tenacity, clean minds, and, above all, a personal
responsibility and devotion for the gifts of body and
soul.

There is no indication of the method by which such
character can be obtained, only a message of desolation
at its loss.

To all the modern claim for character building and a
moral training, Mr. Wells is frankly scornful. Religion
is kept out of his survey, but there are enough occasional
asides to show the direction of his thought and his con-
tempt for the claims of " religious " instruction. " In
spite of a ceremonial adhesion to the religion of his
fathers," the author says of the modern man, " you will
find nothing but a profound agnosticism. He has not
even the faith to disbelieve." Till some such internal
change or faith has come to him, and the society in
which he moves, it is difficult to see how he can be
saved. All manipulations of machinery will leave the
heart cheerless and cold.

Mr. Wells's books are crowded with excellent sug-
gestions of social reorganisation, the clearing away of
lumber and refuse, the oiling and cleaning and polishing
of crank and wheel. But at bottom Mr. Wells is
appealing to a spirit behind the material change.
With the great eighteenth-century dreamers, he desires
a fresh start. With Carlyle and all the school of the
prophets, he demands a new heart ; in the old theological
language, a mind set on righteousness, a will directed
toward harmony with the will of God. He appeals
to the young men. " After thirty there are few
conversions and fewer fine beginnings ; men and women

206

THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN

go on in the path they have marked out for themselves."
What man over thirty so rings his challenge dares
hope for the Republic before he die ? or for an infantile
death-rate under ninety in the thousand, with all the
conquered desolation that such a change would mean?
or "for the deliverance of all of our blood and speech
from those fouler things than chattel slavery, child and
adolescent labour " ? With the young men and women
lies all the hope of the future. A refusal to acquiesce
may be in them a generous ardour for reform. Clean
thought and a vision of better things may lead forward
to a newer day. With this new spirit, which feels
something of the sorrows of the world and its confusion
alike as a reproach and a call to action, the fulfilment of
the coming years may be " better than all our dreams."

ni

In sharp contrast to the bitter humours of the one
and the energy of the other comes the serene out-
look of the third of the prophets. M. Maeterlinck
also is watching the night for the signs of the dawn.
His attitude also is one of acceptance of modern pro-
gress, and its transfiguration. He finds good in the
world of the present. He will have nothing to say
to the cry of disenchantment. He believes this pre-
sent itself may be charged with significance and high
ardour, adequate to all the demands of the human
soul. With a note of triumph he turns from the
long courses of human history, already hurried into
a vanished past, to confront with eagerness and long-
ing the flower and consummation of man's effort in a life
more desirable than man has ever known.

Much of his writing upon modern things is the work
207

BEFORE THE DAWN

of fancy fancy not simple, but carefully elaborated
rather than of imagination. Efforts to personify the
motor-car, the "wonderful beast," "the dreadful hippo-
griff," with description of its soul, its "terrible complex
heart," " the mighty viscera," appear artificial and
overstrained. His summaries of the flowers, the
begonia, "pretty but insolent, and a little artificial";
the double geranium, " indefatigable and extraordinarily
courageous " ; the nasturtium which " screams like a
parrakeet climbing up the bars of its cage " are more
quaint than illuminating. The reader recognises that
the author feels compelled to make a certain effect, and
the results attained are forced rather than spontaneous.
But behind it all is that philosophy of practical life and
outlook upon human affairs which bring M. Maeterlinck's
writings as a real inspiration to many perplexed minds.
He sees a universe from which the old lights have fallen.
The schemes of salvation, the control of benignant
spirits, the manifest presence of a Deity concerned with
human welfare, having suddenly vanished from man's
outward survey. He sweeps the heavens with his
telescopes, and finds no God. He is driven to take up
the business of life with no pillar of cloud by day or
pillar of fire by night to guide him on his journey.
" We are emerging (to speak only of the last three or
four centuries of our present civilisation)," he says
"we are emerging from the great religious period."
The background, the " somewhat gloomy and threaten-
ing background," which " gave a uniform colour to the
atmosphere and the landscape," is to-day " disappearing
in tatters." And the space the abode of our ignor-
ance, "which after the disappearance of the religious
ideas, had appeared frightfully empty, is gradually
becoming peopled with vague but enormous figures."

208

THE MAKING OF THE SUPERMAN

The "Void," the "Infinite," the blind and meaningless
schemata of the sciences which have assumed the
thrones of the elder gods, continue to put unanswerable
questions to the bewildered minds of men. They put
questions to us " and we stammer as best we may."
But the " active idea which we conceive of the riddle
in the midst of which we have our being " is opening
gradually a " luminous and boundless perspective "
which is destined to transfigure all man's activities
and dreams.

" We were, it might be said, like blind men who
should imagine the outer world from inside a shut
room. Now, we are those same blind men whom an
ever-silent guide leads by turns into the forest, across
the plain, on the mountain, and beside the sea. Their
eyes have not yet opened ; but their shaking and eager
hands are able to feel the trees, to rumple the spikes of
corn, to gather a flower or a fruit, to marvel at the ridge
of a rock, or to mingle with the cool waves, while their
ears learn to distinguish, without needing to understand,
the thousand real songs of the sun and the shade, the
wind and the rain, the leaves and the waters."

On the one hand there is this vision of hope and the
enlargement of the human mind which comes from the
apprehension of infinite horizons. " Though we no
longer count, the humanity of which we form a part
is acquiring the importance of which we are being
stripped." The greatest dangers that awaited this
humanity at its hazardous infancy have now been over-
passed. " The instability of the seas and the uprising
of the central fire " are to-day infinitely less to be
feared. We may be permitted to believe that the peril
of " collision with a stray star " may be averted for " the
few centuries of respite necessary for us to learn how to

209 p

BEFORE THE DAWN

ward it off " : till we have learnt to " lay hold of that
essential secret of the worlds which for the time being
and to soothe our ignorance (even as we soothe a child
and lull it to sleep by repeating meaningless and
monotonous words) we have called the law of gravita-
tion." We feel, therefore, in this age the greatness of
expectation looking towards a revealing glory. " We
are in the magnificent state in which Michaelangelo
painted the prophets and the just men of the Old
Testament on that prodigious ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel : we are living in expectation, and perhaps in
the last moment of expectation."

" Expectation, in fact, has degrees which begin with
a sort of vague resignation, and which do not yet hope
for the thrill aroused by the nearest movements of the
expected object. It seems as though we heard those
movements ; the sound of superhuman footsteps, an
enormous door opening, a breath caressing us, or light
coming ; we do not know ; but expectation at this pitch
is an ardent and marvellous state of life, the fairest
period of happiness, its youth, its childhood. . . ."

The one attitude is this of expectation, of inquiry, the
sense of vast powers and purposes almost revealed. M.
Maeterlinck's essays have the best quality of reverie.
There is much directly reminiscent of Sir Thomas
Browne ; reveries of life and death, of the mystery of
things, of symbols and colours, and the secret meanings
of signs and numbers. A fascination for the occult distin-
guishes his latest work, for the spells and enchantments
of the modern spiritualisms and thought-reading, and
oracles and teachings which blossom now, as in former
times, on the ruins of the great systems of religion. He
will inquire concerning the mysteries of chance as seen in
the dancing of the tiny ball on the roulette table at

210

Monte Carlo. He will inquire again how it is, if the
future, arising naturally from the changes of the present,
is as real as the past, that the veil is never withdrawn
which hides this real world from us.

The other attitude is the attitude of contentment with
the common things of life; the conclusion of the
philosophy of the eighteenth century that "it is neces-
sary to cultivate our garden." Under the mysteries
already unfolded, amid the conflagrations of worlds and
systems, undeterred by the vast solitudes of space and
their enormous cold, M. Maeterlinck will cultivate his
garden. Lightness and brightness are added to the
vision of natural beauty. On the " motionless road
where none passes save the eternal forces of life "
spring comes and autumn, the rain and the sun, the
silence and "the night followed by the light of the
moon." It is no small thing that the world should
grow fairer year by year, and men's hearts and the
weather more gentle. " We live in a world in which
flowers are more beautiful and more numerous than
formerly ; and perhaps we have the right to add that
the thoughts of men are more just and greedier of
truth." "We are mastering the nameless powers."
We are making our planet all our own. We are
"adorning our stay" we should rejoice at it "and
gradually broadening the acreage of happiness and of
beautiful life."

The curtain rises upon the violent revolt against the
things of the present which Mr. Shaw voices the voice
of a generation's disgust and weariness. The action of
the play is along the lines of deliberate improvement
outlined by Mr. Wells with such energy and appeal.

211

BEFORE THE DAWN

And the curtain falls upon a vision of gentleness and
tranquillity in the garden of flowers.

Is this a forecast or but a challenge of the courses
of human life in the civilisation of the West during the
century which has opened with such uncertain dawn ?

212

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

11 To the scientist the earth mutt for ever roll around the
central solar fire : to the poet the sun must for ever set behind
the western hills."

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

corrodes all weakness and stamps strength
_ with the guarantee of its approval. Examina-
tion of its fretting upon the work of earlier enthusiasms
is a task always fruitful, always mournful. Science,
Literature, Religion alike are compelled to encounter its
salt winds and subtle forces of decay. Science rests, it
would appear, upon knowledge secure when attained,
and henceforth indifferent to its ravages. Literature is
the expression of man's soul in which Time can effect no
change. Religion and its experience belongs to a time-
less universe. Yet the man who, with candour, will
examine the work of the years immediately past will
find in none of these regions of human action that
serene security. I can think of three authors which
each at one time burst upon the mind with an over-
mastering domination. Huxley had said the final
word of the sciences. Mr. Swinburne represented the
supreme expression of all that passionate youth desires
of literature. Newman had penetrated to the ultimate
recesses of the human soul within, and the revelation
without of a hidden God. It is no unprofitable task to
review after a decade what of these ardours still endures.

How is time treating the man of science, whose name
sounds through all the great intellectual conflicts of the
past half-century? Huxley was indeed more than a

215

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

scientific investigator. Writing a pure and nervous
English, he plunged into varied fields philosophy,
theology, sociology, the struggle for intellectual free-
dom. In all these many hailed him as leader. Here
time has already commenced the work of destruction.
The enthusiasm stimulated by the vision of succes-
sive scientific advances has become less strident.
The " fairy godmother " whom he praised has proved
powerless to abolish the evils of life. Pain and
poverty still remain to trouble the little life of man.
The Golden Age has been relegated to a remoter
future. In face of a seven-million peopled Abyss of
lives austere with want and crime, the famous alterna-
tive which Huxley himself suggested, the " kindly
comet " whose advent he would hail as a " desirable
consummation," might seem a not unwelcome alter-
native. In this and in other matters the spirit of men
has undergone a profound change. His was an age of
faith without belief ; ours, of belief without faith. He
fought for a dismal nescience with the fervour and
devotion of a Puritan. We have witnessed a spiritual
revival, a reaction towards constructive belief and a
faith in the unseen. But this faith is languid and
spiritless. Men for the most part hold these things
only tedious, and marvel at the excitement manifested
by their fathers.

Beyond the changes of the age, the work of Huxley
can be seen in a clearer perspective. His vigorous
certainty, the power of popular controversy which he
possessed, the transparent honesty and truthfulness of
the man, exercised a dominant influence upon his
contemporaries. It seemed impossible to conceive
that he could be in the wrong. To-day certain limi-
tations appear. He was never a Liberal, either in

216

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

politics or in the world of thought. He held in a real
abhorrence everything represented by the name of
Gladstone. To the most heroic and sincere of all
English statesmen he found it difficult to award even
the common virtue of honesty. Huxley joined issue
along the whole line from Home Rule to the Gadarene
pigs. He read into the political action some of the
rather complicated and tortuous methods of the theo-
logical controversies. He became convinced that he
was dealing with a mind evasive and rhetorical, over-
rated, leading England down slippery paths. Towards
the end of his life he recognised that a kind of sacred
duty was laid upon him to assail the Liberal leader
at every vulnerable point. Nor was he a Liberal in
thought. He fought, indeed, for tolerance. But he
desired the toleration, not of opinion, but of his own
opinions. His attitude, as Herbert Spencer told him
unkindly and in a famous controversy, was that of a
theologian rather than a philosopher. He refused
resolutely to defend the baser and more popular
atheisms. His treatment of the newer sciences of
mental disturbance and obscure aberration was essen-
tially similar to the treatment against which his own
sciences had slowly struggled to recognition. His
attitude to the Psychical Research Society to the last
was one of contempt. One can imagine the disgust
with which he would contemplate the respect and wel-
come which have been given in later years to the work
of this body of explorers.

Sure of himself and with a power of relentless
analysis possessed by but a few, he became the terror
of all weak adherents of traditional creeds. Certainly
he cleared the ground of much encumbering rubbish.
Yet his philosophy, when viewed as a whole, shows

217

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

strange inconsistencies, and his theological knowledge
presents startling gaps. In philosophy he knew the
English thinkers well, Hume and Berkeley; he could
estimate upon the traditional English lines the problems
presented by the newer knowledge. But he never under-
stood Kant. All German metaphysics he dismissed as
moonshine. He spoke for the moment, upon set occa-
sion, and it is impossible to unify his often sensational,
always noteworthy, lectures and essays into one con-
sistent body of doctrine. In one place he pictured
human beings as "conscious automata " with all future
changes exactly determined by the past, and conscious-
ness but as the shadow of the locomotive, accompanying
but uninfluencing the progress of change. At another
he breaks into a passionate assertion that human will
" counts for something as a condition of the course of
events," and urges each of his hearers deliberately to
set himself to lighten the world's load of suffering.
On the broad question of ultimate reality he fluctuated
in quite an extraordinary fashion between an idealism
and a materialism. At one time he compared the
advance of law in the spiritual world to the advance of
an eclipse upon a terrified sun-worshipper seeing the
extinction of his god. At another he is roundly dismiss-
ing all these " laws " and compulsions as gratuitously
invested bugbears. On the moral question he definitely
changed. At first he was laboriously pleading for a
purely natural system of ethics, and the handy and ser-
viceable garments which science would provide. Later,
in his Komanes lecture, the most brilliant in style of
all his work, he is tearing to tatters a " cosmic process "
consummating only in the instincts of the ape and the
tiger. In his theological excursions, acute and sugges-
tive as they remain, his limitations are no less manifest.

218

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

He knew the work of Baur and one or two other German
scholars. The opponents he fought unfortunately knew
less. But he was convinced that the whole fabric of
the accepted religion stood as one piece. He had been
brought up to hold verbal inspiration as the only legiti-
mate theory. The rejection of a Garden of Eden or a
Noachian deluge seemed to him the rejection of the
whole of Christianity. Those who treated these
stories in any but literal form he branded as disin-
genuous and "wrigglers." He appeared never to
have heard of Clement or Origen, or a time when
while Christianity was making its greatest advances,
these early legends were frankly accepted as allegorical.
Such are the losses. What remains ? The man
still stands as a great figure and character, for which
the world is richer. He was strong, hewn from rock,
trenchant of all shams and sophistries, honest as the
day, stern often, but with a fund of passionate tender-
ness only revealed to the outside world after his death.
Ever a fighter, he delighted in battle with his peers.
He loved the combat for the combat's sake. Yet he
was ever courteous, generous, scrupulously fair, deter-
mined never needlessly to offend. The honesty and
utter devotion to truth is perhaps the outstanding
feature. His letter to Charles Kingsley, in which,
under the sudden agony of a strong man's suffering,
he poured out to his friend the secrets of his heart,
stands as one of the great utterances in the history of
the life of the spirit. From the grave of his dead
child he refused to delude himself with a hope which,
could he only accept it, would have changed the face of
the world. Like George Eliot, he resolved to do without
opium. It was this resolute truthfulness which gave
him the power to destroy with such sudden and over-

219

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

whelming destruction such as Samuel Wilberforce.
The scene at the British Association meeting at
Oxford has become historic as one of the great
episodes in the conflict between authority and progress.

The record of friendships which kept such a body as
the X Society dining together for so many decades ;
the touches of home affection, the very human outbursts
of impatience at stupidity and ignorance in high places ;
the tenderness of the strong man towards children and
the weak; the occasional passages of almost startling
self-revelation, of half-wistful hope moderating the trucu-
lent agnosticism as he confronts the mysteries of Life
and Death these are the elements which reveal a
character of an unchanging attraction.

It is the strenuous life devoted to high ends. There
is a very pleasant picture in his life of the Sunday even-
ings in St. John's Wood in the latter years. In summer
the family are gathered in the garden. Friends drop in,
there is talk of the latest scientific results, of progress,
and the smiting of the enemy. It is the afternoon
of the successful man, golden, but with a touch of
evening and the approaching night. There is that in
plenty which should accompany old age : honour, love,
obedience, troops of friends. Only in the end some-
thing appears lacking. Perhaps the outlook entirely
narrowed to a fragment of time and the success of a
lifetime stands judged by a sense of larger issues beyond.
It is Sunday evening. Outside the walled garden is a
chaos of confusion and pain. And as the twilight falls
there comes the sound of a world-old appeal renewed
ever in humility and patience : " Pitifully behold the
sorrows of our hearts. Mercifully forgive the sins of
Thy people."

220

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

n

Mr. Swinburne in the preface to the collected edition
of his work, has surveyed the long progress from the
day when " Atalanta " revealed a new and magnifi-
cent force in literature, and later the first poems and
ballads astonished and scandalised the world. He
found nothing of which to repent, nothing to with-
draw. He described the whole succession of changing
subjects : the early poetry of passion, the songs of
sunrise, the national faith and its heroes, the dramas,
the poems of spiritual revolt, and the celebration of
the coming dawn ; and after these the poetry of
natural things and of childhood ; and, above all, the
voice of triumph and longing which runs through the
whole series, the " light and sound and darkness
of the sea." Of the first, " there are photographs
from life in the book," he asserted, " and there are
sketches from imagination. Some which keen-sighted
criticism has dismissed with a smile as ideal or imaginary
were as real and actual as they well could be ; others
which have been taken for obvious transcripts from
memory were utterly fantastic or dramatic." To all
that hubbub of anger of " the spiritually still-born
children of dirt and dullness," the author was as
indifferent then as he is to-day.

But in the poems of freedom " there is no touch of
dramatic impersonation or imaginary emotion/' They
were inspired by " such faith as is born of devotion and
reverence " ; reverence to a cause and to its leaders ;
especially to " the three living gods, I do not say of my
idolatry, for idolatry is a term inapplicable where the
gods are real and true, but of my whole-souled and

221

single-hearted worship " Landor, Hugo, Mazzini the
last "the man whom I had always revered above the
other men on earth."

The appeal of the new spiritual sunrise, with the
signs of the passing of the night of the older re-
ligions Mr. Swinburne gathered up especially in " twin
poems of antiphonal correspondence in subject and
sound," " the ' Hymn to Proserpine ' and the ' Hymn
of Man ' the death song of spiritual decadence, and
the birth song of spiritual renascence."

Such a defiant re-assertion of the faith of a lifetime
is a challenge to all the memories of the past. I
commenced, a boy at school, with the earlier selections,
reading in mingled perplexity and tedium. The long
sea poems of the second series of the " Poems and
Ballads," with their difficult metres, their rhetoric, and
their frequent obscurity, serve as about the worst
possible form of introduction to Mr. Swinburne's poetry.
And a volume which contained scarcely anything from
the first " Poems and Ballads," and none of the greatest
of the Atalanta choruses a volume omitting " The
Garden of Proserpine " and the " Triumph of Time "
and "Hesperia," with the "Songs before Sunrise"
very inadequately represented, failed altogether to reveal
the magic of the master.

My conversion was effected later, at Cambridge, and
at a lecture upon Swinburne by Mr. Frederic Myers.
The instrument of the sudden change was the end of
" Tristram " recited in the deep, impassioned chant
which I suppose Myers had learnt from Tennyson. I
can still hear the throb of the music as the emotion
deepened to the splendour of that imperishable close :

222

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

" Nor where they sleep shall moon or sunlight shine,
Nor man look down for ever ; none shall say
Here once, or here, Tristram and Iseult lay ;
But peace they have that none may gain who live,
And rest about them that no love can give,
And over them, while death and life shall be,
The light and sound and darkness of the sea."

From that moment commenced an allegiance which
speedily passed into an unfaltering worship.

Then came the period, which most young men have
passed through, of intoxication, when we would hurl
Swinburnian imprecations upon " whatever gods may
be," or in the interval between a football match and a
hearty meal proclaim our thirst for annihilation to the
unconscious stars. Time and the experience of sorrow
wore down these earlier ardours ; much of the swing-
ing stanzas began to appear as rhetoric, or at best
eloquence, rather than poetry. Much also was revealed
as so detached, cold, and separate from " the labouring
world "as to give the impression of a hard, inhuman
glitter and brilliance ; the brilliance of the Arabian
Nights, the hardness and cruelty of the stories of
fairyland.

But still the old spell in part remains. To-day one
can again recall the fascination of the buoyancy and
ardour, the waves of passionate eloquence, that violence
of triumph and weariness which will make Swinburne
always the singer of the springtime, and only pass when
youth has vanished from the world.

No poet has attained such general recognition of
supremacy with less general acceptance of his ideals in
life and literature. In a secure vitality, and with
Death a thing incredible, we were all intoxicated with
the poems of its praise. Later, with life passing, and

223

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

the shadow lengthening on the hills, " the end of every
man's desire " seemed something less desirable. It
says much for the spells and sorcery of the enchanter,
the magic of an outburst of music, alike mournful and
triumphant, that the accepted verdict could even for a
moment be denied, and men at the last gather to enlist
under the defiant banner of defeat.

For it is not death alone which is here commemorated
in song. Not only the fascination of sleep and silence
are celebrated in the hymn to Proserpine, and revealed
in the unforgettable vision of her garden, with its
bloomless poppies and dreams of forsaken days. Here
is also the elevation of Destruction as against Creation,
the denial of the desirability of life itself, the deliberate
rejection of that exultation of Being for which the
morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God
shouted for joy. Mr. Swinburne ' v took the work of the
Revolution and pushed it home, without that faith in a
universal restitution which broke the seals and poured
out the vials and loosened " the thunder of the trumpets
of the night." He tears down King and Priest. He
rages against all the ancient oppressive laws. He
demands the clearance of the accumulated refuse of the
dead. But this alone will not content him. Destruc-
tion, renunciation, annihilation must be elevated in the
place of the gods dethroned. And in the end he
passes to a world vision of the work of dissolution
accomplishing itself to its far conclusion: the earth
and all its peoples passing, its hopes and hates, its homes
and fanes, the bones of the grave and the grave in which
they have been laid ; sun, moon, and stars crashing into
the abyss : hell and the palaces of heaven and the older
and the newer gods, and everything that is and has been
and is to come crumbling into darkness and silence, with

224

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

all that remains an enormous nothingness, an enormous
cold. Others have gazed upon this picture with shudder-
ing, while deeming it but a dream and a vision. Modern
theories of Evolution have suddenly endowed it with
fierce and insistent life. It was left for the century
which felt the thing gripping at its heart to produce a
poet who would confront it not with horror, but with
exultation, proclaiming with a passionate violence the
ending of all violence and passionxx'

This is new in literature, and this must endure,
the vision is not yet destined to vanish. A civilisation
becoming more and more divided from sane and rational
things is destined more and more eagerly to welcome a
Gotterdammerung which will involve not only itself,
but all existence in a cosmic desolation. Two great
and emotional appeals against this assertion of an
elemental despair lie in the early work of Mr.
Swinburne. In the choruses of the " Atalanta " is
the revolt rather than the acquiescence of man in
such an ending. " Because thy name is life and
our name death " ; because " thou hast fed one rose
with dust of many men " ; therefore " all we are against
thee, against thee, O God most high." And in the
" Songs before Sunrise," with their celebration of national
resistance to Imperial supremacy, a resistance congruous
with " the actual earth's equalities, air, light, and night,
hills, winds, and trees," manifested in the European
struggle for the liberation of the smaller peoples, the
worship of Proserpine vanished before the vision of a
splendid dawn.

Later Mr. Swinburne turned back upon the national
cause : and with that desertion his inspiration fell from
him like a garment ; so that with each successive volume
of fluent verse men said sadly to one another : " There

225 g

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

was a Swinburne." These later productions form a
study of profound sadness. With the poems arranged in
order of writing, and surveyed as a whole, the volumes
might not untruthfully be labelled " the dying of Genius."
To turn from the opening of the " Poems and Ballads "
to the close of the " Channel Passage " is to turn from
life to death. Youth has gone, and with youth the
passionate faith in high, disinterested causes. The
poems leave a nasty taste in the mouth ; the taste of a
snarl and a sneer. Much might appear as a parody
of Swinburne written by a reporter of the journalism
of the day. The injunction to the Russian revolu-
tionists upon the accession of the present Czar to
" smite and send him howling down his father's way "
may perhaps be passed as, at least, in the tradition of
the terrible sonnets of 1870 upon " Napoleon III."
But what is to be said of the jeerings at the Irish
Nationalists, the clamorous invective dashed against
Gladstone ? Or those deplorable sonnets in which the
poet acclaims the sailing of the soldiers against the
Boer Ptepublics ? The foes of England are chivalrously
described as " like wolves," " dogs agape with jaws
afoam," with " foul tongues that blacken God's dis-
honoured name." The poet cries for vengeance and
destruction and screeches shrilly for blood.

The emotion aroused in the reader is that of Japhet
towards the drunken Noah. These poems are already
dead. In the future they will be mercifully forgotten.
To escape from this fog and foulness to a cleaner air
and the sight again of sunlight and the stars you have
only to turn back to the former things :

" Content thee, howsoe'er, whose days are done ;
There lies not any troublous thing before,
226

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more ;
For whom all winds are quiet as the sun,
All waters as the shore."

It is welcome to turn from so indecent a spectacle to
the memories of the earlier time. For here is the out-
burst of an inspiration's dawn ; before a too passionate
spring tide and time which changes all good things had
left nothing but scentless autumn flowers, and of all the
year's earlier promise " only dead yew leaves and a little
dust."

in

Newman, of all the pilgrims of Eternity, absorbed in
a world alien to the common interests of man, stands
alone in the fascination of his influence upon those
of entirely incongruous ideals. Amongst all the strange
problems of his personality, none are more perplexing
than that of the origins. That " typical Englishmen "
should have inherited traditions long imbedded in the
past. The writer of the most perfect and simple Eng-
lish prose since Bunyan, the child of the English
Church, with enthusiasm for her ancient ways, the
voice through which the very spirit of Oxford and the
old University ideal became articulate, should have
originated, one would think, in some secluded line of
ancestry, an historical family of the landed classes, or
with memories of ancestral services to learning and
religion. The facts were entirely otherwise. Newman
was a stranger, an alien, with scarcely a drop of Eng-
lish blood in his veins. On his father's side he was
descended from a line of Dutch Jews ; on his mother's,
from a family of French Huguenots. He appears as
the son of a clerk in a banking firm, in straitened cir-

227

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

cumstances. His childhood was passed near Richmond.
He attended a middle-class school at Ealing. His
sister's name was Jemima. He was reared in the
typical evangelical piety of the middle classes, which,
turned stagnant, gave cause later for such merciless
satire in " Loss and Gain." Two rough deductions
from history to which Newman seemed an exception,
are indeed confirmed by the discovery of this ancestry.
The one is that genius is the child of the mixture
of races. The other is that the great religious
leaders and saints of England, from the days of Anselm
or Hugh of Lincoln, the " humble and heavenly
stranger," have been for the most part of alien stock.
The pure Saxon blood does not easily turn to the high
endeavours of the soul.

Those who would fully estim ate the life of this extra-
ordinary man, are confronted with a difficulty at the
present insuperable. In the first half of the story, the
material is superabundant ; in the second, almost
entirely lacking. " The going out of '45 " cut through
the life history, severing all the strings of friendship
and tradition. From existence passed in a glare of
sunshine almost pitiless, revealing every spot and
wrinkle, Newman suddenly passed into silence and
grey shadow. For over forty years there remain but a
few scattered letters : the Manning correspondence,
occasional notes to Lord Acton and others, and such
chance reminiscences as have appeared in the biography
of others. The published books alone for the majority
revealed that Newman still lived on. These years were
of tranquillity indeed, and confidence in the haven
attained after rough voyaging. But there were schemes
of service always checked and baffled, and the failure of
many designs whose influences might have been incal-

228

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

culable. The plan for his retranslation of the Catholic
Bible was sanctioned by Wiseman, then withdrawn in
obedience to the protest of the booksellers. The daring
project of a return to Oxford, which might have changed
the history of the future, was checked and finally
destroyed by Manning in a piece of ecclesiastical
intrigue which the friends of Catholicism would fain
forget. " A painful correspondence " ended in "a
lifelong estrangement." Seven years were spent in
a kind of nightmare struggle in Ireland, endeavour-
ing to create a Catholic University, amid a chaos of
political intrigue and religious bigotry. The history of
this he has left in a volume privately printed. The
true history of that troublous experiment would make a
record at once entertaining and piteous. He was torn
between two parties, each demanding the support of his
great name, each indignant when he refused to throw in
his lot with them. The Liberals, under Lord Acton,
held that he had deceived and betrayed them. To the
last, Lord Acton could never afterwards speak of New-
man without reproach and bitterness. The opponents
of Liberalism on the other hand, were never likely to
forgive the spirit which found expression in the denun-
ciation of their methods in the letter on the Vatican
decree. A criticism, says his latest biographer, " which
includes all his opponents," is " that they failed to
comprehend an intellect greater than their own, busy
with problems to the vast horizons of which their view
could not extend."

The great works which remain to-day for our estimate
and judgment are in fact but polemical pamphlets called
forth by the controversy of a day. But for the madness
of the Catholic aggression, we would never have had the
" Present Position of Catholics," one of the great books

229

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

of the nineteenth century : a plea against mob-rule un-
equalled in its mingling of pathos, irony, and restraint.
But for the call to impossible work in Ireland, the
lectures on the " Ideal of a University " would never
have been given ; and the world would have been poorer
by the most magnificent of appeals for knowledge as in
itself an end, for theology as an essential of true learn-
ing, for education in its true and not its accepted
meaning. And but for Kingsley's random and reckless
onslaught the " Apologia " would never have been
written, and Newman would have gone to his grave
unvindicated ; the product of six weeks' white-heat
emotion having produced, as by a kind of miracle, one
of the most convincing of all records of the pilgrimage of
the soul.

Still to-day, however, abides unchallenged the
supremacy of Newman's English prose. For mingled
refinement, simplicity, gentleness, this stands unrivalled
in his time. Specially concerned and entirely congruous
with the deeper things of existence sin and its con-
sequences, the mysteries encompassing human life, its
uncertainty and future, the longing of the soul for God
it possesses qualities which would have made Newman
triumphant upon the plane of the controversies of the
world. His power of irony, indeed, is unsurpassed ;
triumphant in all its expressions : from the more delicate
irony of the description of the English gentleman,
through the broader satire upon the English view of
" Don Felix Melatesta de Guadaloupe," to the savage
and awful irony of the lost soul's awakening in the
" Sermons to Mixed Congregations," at which the
reader is moved against his will to a kind of metallic
laughter.

It is as a mysterious, majestic figure that Newman
230

THE CHALLENGE OF TIME

appears in the history of his age : at heart solitary.
Life for him was " a dialogue not a drama." Turn
where you will in his writing, you find the same spirit :
an inner life of ahsorbing interest, a grave wonder at the
ends and ideals of man, his folly, his aspirations, the
confusion he has made of his world. The music of that
voice holds the listener enchanted, as it appeals from
all transitory things to those which alone are secure and
abiding ;

" The world goes on from age to age, but the Holy
Angels and blessed Saints are always crying alas, alas !
and woe, woe ! over the loss of vocations and the dis-
appointment of hopes, and the scorn of God's love and
the rain of souls. . . . Times come and go, and men
will not believe that that is to be which is not yet, or
that what now is only continues for a season, and is
not eternity. The end is the trial : the world passes :
it is but a pageant and a scene : the lofty palace
crumbles, the busy city is mute, the ships of Tarshish
have sped away. On heart and flesh death is coming ;
the veil is breaking. ... 0, my Lord and Saviour, let
me die as I desire to live, in Thy faith, in Thy Church,
in Thy Service, and in Thy love."

The curtain of that quiet life is torn aside for a
moment at intervals as the years go by. At each
revelation Newman appears, still expecting, looking
outwards at the tremendous turmoil of the world with
pity, sadness, surprise. In his own chosen epitaph, he
turned "Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem." That
world then and afterwards has been at once attracted
and baffled : as the world is ever attracted and baffled
by one who possesses both a secret which it cannot
penetrate, and an indifference to all it holds dear.

231

"Nil nisi Divinum stabile eat, ccetera fumus."

MANTEGNA.

OF DEATH AND PITJ

r I THERE are books and writers which command
JL a universal attention. The critic immediately
can assert a supremacy. Here is literature, unchal-
lenged, secure. The world may be indifferent, the
comment of the crowd perplexed or doubtful. But the
decision is confident and final. There are others, for
which no similar high claim can be advanced, which
yet may appeal to the individual with a particular
entreaty. There are weaknesses obvious, flaws, limita-
tions. The legitimacy of another's criticism must be
recognised, as the claim is dismissed with scorn or
aberration, and direct interest is suggested as the cause
of the extravagant praise. Nevertheless every writer
who is compelled to pass under review any large
quantities of prose and poetry must of necessity find
some which, through temperament or common interest,
comes with a special appeal. Henceforth this work is
placed upon a particular shelf of the memory. He can
listen unmoved to all analysis and depreciation. To
you these are nothing, or but ruins of great effort : to
me they have come with something of the force of an
inspiration.

I can think of certain tiny volumes in all a few
hundred pages which in the past few years, amongst

235

OF DEATH AND PITY

literature still unrecognised, have given me this special
delight. Here I can describe some of them : a volume
of gloomy, almost morbid, self-analysis by an author
terming himself " Mark Rutherford " : a series of little
impressionist sketches by Mr. Lewis Hind : the " Son-
nets of the Wingless Hours " : the poems of Mrs.
Marriott Watson.

All of these penetrate beneath the outward show of
things. All present a picture of a world of tragic
import unheeded in the traffic of men. There is
the soul's hunger behind the visible pages, a vision of
longing and baffled purposes. The spirit which unites
them all is the sense of the greatness and the sadness
of the life of man, pent up in the kingdoms of Pity
and of Death.

My first reading of the "Autobiography" was at
Cambridge, and my marked copy is the fifth edition,
dated 1892. I took the book home from the book-
sellers and read it through at a sitting, and immediately
hurried out and ordered the " Deliverance," which,
when it came, received the same treatment. I thought
then that the two books represented in their intimacy
and sincerity and simple, refined style something
unique in modern English literature. For perhaps
the seventh time I have read this life story again.
And I would entirely endorse the earlier verdict. If
this be not literature " of the centre," then all our
accepted standards of taste must be abandoned, and the
test of greatness sought in the popular rhetoric and
the largest circulation in the world.

236

OF DEATH AND PITY

Yet " Mark Rutherford " has never entirely come
into his own. Many who are familiar with that thin
stream of literature which still trickles through the
parched and blackened land of present printed matter,
have failed to recognise the greatness of this life history
of one of the unimportant. I remember once discussing
with Professor Henry Sidgwick these and other works.
He told me that as he was getting older he came more
and more to limit his novel reading to those books
which gave him pleasure, and that he could not find
pleasure in such works as the " Autobiography of Mark
Rutherford." And indeed the standpoint has to be
somewhat detached an appreciation of artistic excel-
lence, of one thing set to do, and supremely well done
if pleasure is to be obtained from this haunting picture
of man's futility and his failure. " Mark Rutherford,"
as Bagehot's old lady said of Thackeray, is "an un-
comfortable writer." The passionless detachment of
the narrative makes the resultant impression all the
more challenging and sorrowful. The reader finds
himself suddenly confronted with pictures which he
would fain forget, with questionings which he has
generally managed to put by in the bustle of business
or pleasure. A modern scientific writer has announced
a transformation, through the growth of a newer
knowledge, of the last words of the ancient wisdom.
" Man, know thyself," has been changed into the
counsel, " Man, may thou never know what thou art."
If this verdict is to be accepted as final, the work of
" Mark Rutherford " may well be placed on some future
index of proscription of a race determined to life always
in the summer days.

This dreary outlook, in his case as in the case of
another painter of modern life and its failures,

237

OF DEATH AND PITY

George Gissing, may be the chief cause of the
lack of recognition. In the city civilisation of the
present there is an element of boisterous and lively
fancy, noisy and cheerful and untroubled by the pale
cast of thought. Hampstead Heath and Margate
Sands, the popular election scrimmage, the Daily
Telegraph, give together that note of exuberance
which Mr. Boutmy has found most characteristic of
the English middle class. This note is altogether
absent from Mark Rutherford's pages. In one of the
late chapters of the "Deliverance " the author describes
how one Sunday, on " a lovely summer's morning in
mid July," he and Ellen and the child Marie took an
excursion to Hastings. " Our pleasure was exquisite,
we had a wonderful time." " To be free of the litter
and filth of a London suburb, of its broken hedges, its
brickbats, its torn advertisements, its worn and trampled
grass in fields, half given over to the speculative builder,
in place of this to tread the immaculate sea-shore, over
which breathed a wind not charged with soot, to replace
the dull, shrouding obscurity of the smoke by a distance
so distinct that the masts of the ships whose hulls were
buried below the horizon were visible all this was
perfect bliss."

" We wanted nothing, we had nothing to achieve."
Later, on the return home, " all the glory of the
morning" was forgotten in a huddled, overcrowded
carriage, with drinking women roaring obscene songs.
The incident is symbolic of a life history, or, rather, of
a temperament. His companions on the excursion were
probably profoundly bored by the sun and the sea, and
only happy in the intervals of eating, rollicking merri-
ment, and the joys of the return journey. Lacking this
rollicking joy through all discomfort, the single isolated

238

OF DEATH AND PITY

toiler, trampled under in the modern struggle for exist-
ence, may be forgiven if he thinks that he has anticipated
the tortures of the Inferno. And the type of all civilised
existence is gathered up in one pitiful figure here
exhibited for a moment in the waste of London. A
clerk in a gallery, four foot from the ceiling in a gas-
lighted office, his life consists in addressing envelopes
ten hours a day. He is bewildered by the perpetual
foul grossness of his fellow-slaves : and only able to
endure the awful monotony of his existence by changes
from steel pens to quills, or variations in the walk to the
house of his servitude.

Modern England appears in these pages, modern
England, indeed, under grey skies, and interpreted by one
to whom the passing of the dreams of childhood and its
high hopes for the future has brought none of the
customary apathy and numbness. In the " Auto-
biography" the scene is mainly in the provinces.
The interest is in spiritual combats amongst the
ultimate questions of existence. Here is an unfor-
gettable gallery of portraits of the types of the lower
middle class in provincial cities. These, it must be
confessed, are in the main unpleasant with narrowness
and hypocrisy. Sordid love of gain is dominant, with
an incredibly low standard of culture and of honour.
They include the students of the theological college,
the worshippers of Water Lane, Mr. Snale, the " Christian
tradesman " and bully, and Mrs. Snale, " cruel, not
with the ferocity of the tiger, but with the dull insensi-
bility of a cart-wheel," and Mr. Hexton, with " not a
single chink, however narrow, through which his soul
looked out of itself upon the great world around."
They come, they go. Of few are more than a few
words said. The narrator passes from the college

239

OF DEATH AND PITY

through the Baptist chapel at the little provincial
town to the Unitarian chapel in the country, and so
to the private school and the Atheistic publishing office.
But in each chapter appear these clear-cut characters,
drawn with a confident, firm hand. So that the reader
is convinced that all these societies still live on. Beyond
his interests is enduring that strange world of obscure
and complacent human lives, carried through an exist-
ence to whose meaning and possibilities of kindliness
and high endeavour, in its brief passage between
two "eternities, they seem destined to be for ever
blind.

In the "Deliverance" the scene has passed to
London. The spiritual struggle has become replaced
by revolt against the meanness and monotony and
squalor, the material ills of ugliness and poverty. The
problems here presented of degenerating life appear
"round and hard like a ball of adamant," and men
and women move through time, helpless, disconsolate,
" with great gaping needs which they longed to satisfy."
In two or three chapters a gaunt and desolate picture is
drawn of the modern city, the isolation of its inhabitants
each from the other, its confusion, its carelessness of
pain. London on Sunday afternoon in autumn fog, or
the cold winds of spring ; London in shadow ; the
actual slums with their outrage on the senses, and
the gaudy sign of the undertaker as the sole evidence
of the survival of human aspiration ; the solitary sufferers
who have been trampled under and flung aside, John,
the waiter, Cardinal, burdened with his jealous wife,
Taylor, the coal porter, working always in the dark all
these in a few pages call up a pageant of maimed and
broken lives which remain long after the book has closed
as a troublous vision.

240

OF DEATH AND PITY

The picture, indeed, is not entirely grey. The world
of which " no theory is possible " is seen to contain
besides " children sickening in cellars " and "the rain
slowly rotting the harvest," no less obvious " an evening
in June, the delight of men and women in one another,"
love and human kindness. Something like tranquillity
is attained before death enters as with a bludgeon, and
suddenly and clumsily makes an end of all. There
is acceptance of life's simple pleasures, gratitude for any
kind of response and affection, a wearing down of the
harsh fretting of the enigmas into a patience which
can even cherish a kind of hope. Human life, here
and now, with the age of belief in a future restitution
dead, and the age of a satisfying present not yet
born, appears in the life history of Mark Rutherford not
unlike his own picture of the Essex marshes. The land
stretches low and level into the far horizon ; with thick
yellow clay clinging round the bitter weeds and dis-
coloured yellow grasses ; and stagnant, scum-covered
pools mingling with the smell of the earth the rank odour
of decay. But there is a crimson light in the west
at evening : the wind that blows at sunset is laden
with the breath and salt scents of the sea ; and all
the long night in the high heavens wheel and flash the
unchanging stars the stars that shone in Eden, and
will shine again in Paradise.

n

The language of the famous "Conclusion" rises
naturally to the mind as the reader turns over the
pages of " Life's Lesser Moods." Here, indeed, " not

241 R

OF DEATH AND PITY

the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end."
" With this sense of the splendour of our experience
and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one
desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have
time to make theories about the things we see and
touch." Walter Pater, afterwards in " Marius,"
showed the practical workings of a life thus startled
by magnificence and the apprehension of death into a
" constant and eager observation." Moving detached
through field and forest, or along the city ways, the
observer drew from the things seen autumn leaves,
the sun behind the pine-trees, the face of a child the
apprehension of " some passionate attitude of those
about us," and the "tragic dividing of forces on their
ways." The experience is won from common things,
in the appeal which the labouring world passes by : a
sudden revelation of hidden emotion; a colour that
flares, and in a moment fades ; " a breath, a flame in
the doorway, a feather in the wind."

The attitude of Marius eighteen hundred years ago
is the attitude of Mr. Hind to-day. He, too, is to be
reckoned among those who looked on, a little perplexed,
a little diverted, sometimes sorrowful, as they confront
the noise of passing things. Men are planting and
building, busy about material things, eager for wealth,
and crying for fame, for the heaping up of wealth
which another shall inherit, for a fame which is but
the ripple of a moment in the midst of an Eternal
Silence. Conscious even in the grey city of the
splendour of our experience, with the sense also of
its awful brevity ever before him, he sees the thing
pass like a panorama in which the shouting becomes
shrill and presently dies away, and all the gold and
glory crumbles to a little dust. Immediately, however,

242

OF DEATH AND PITY

is the present experience, directly apprehended. There
resides an appeal as insistent and compelling in the
labyrinth of London as in the autumn of dying Rome ;
the setting sun reflected in the roadside puddle ; a night
of rain, a night of stars ; high emotion in meeting and
parting, ten minutes in a railway carriage, the sights
of a street on a winter morning. The flame of outward
life, of the unchanging beauty: the flame of inner
passion : the inscrutable mysteries of each individual
separate soul, knowing its own bitterness, knowing its
heart's particular joy ; these make up the world of the
wanderer, as he roams with hungry heart through Eng-
land and Spain and Italy, and records impressions of
life's lesser moods " a breath, a flame in the doorway,
a feather in the wind."

The attitude of detachment, a refusal to judge, is
written on every page. An impression is given, here
and now, recounted as truthfully as may be. And there
each is left ; standing isolated in the past, a picture ;
without any attempt to co-ordinate it to the entire
scheme of things, glad or sorry ; to estimate, to approve,
or to condemn. The method is so un-English that it
is difficult to prophesy its development or popularity.
We write for edification. We never rest on the expe-
rience without demanding its fruit or teaching. Each
particular incident must carry thought from itself to the
boundaries of things. The record of a child shivering
in the rain would appear to us intolerably cold without
an appeal at the end for free breakfasts, or an impeach-
ment of a society which can allow such things to be.
The gleam of a golden sunshine must attest the good-
ness of God. Thunder and the bitter frost must certify
the presence of evil in the world. To stand aside is to
acknowledge indifference. To accept all is to enlist

243

amongst those who neither for God nor for His enemies,
are " scorned alike of heaven and hell."

An actual example will beat illustrate this un-English
attitude. In one of Mr. Hind's sketches he pictures
the " Unemployed " marching through the West End
streets. The dingy red banner, the meagre figures,
escorted by the stalwart, indifferent policeman, the
rattle of the collecting-boxes, the clang of many foot-
steps along the frozen roads, the scornful comment of
the bystanders are woven into an impression of con-
tempt and pity with an undernote of fear.

" Later in the day I met them again. It was twilight
time ; but the fog had made an end of the day early
in the afternoon. Over everything hung that murky
gloom, over the procession of the unemployed, over the
faces of the employed who left their work to watch.
The day's tramp was ending; they were going east-
wards home but the fog was so dense that I could
see only those who slouched close by. Somewhere far
in front the head of the procession felt its way through
the dim streets ; somewhere far behind the tail followed
obediently ; and out of the thick night came the rattle
of the coins in the collecting-boxes. A woman near me
pushed the box contemptuously away. ' Want work,
do they?' she cried. 'I've been a week trying to
get a man to mend a window- sash.' '

" The barrow with the naphtha lamp passed on. I
watched the last straggler of the London unemployed
disappear into the fog." There is no approval. There
is no condemnation. There is no denunciation of
society or appeal to Charity Organisation. There is
no effort to weigh merits or pardon offences. There is
merely an extraordinarily vivid picture of an actual
experience, for a moment present, in a moment gone.

244

OF DEATH AND PITY

The author, like the ancient magicians, can reveal the
vision. No more than they can he reveal the inter-
pretation thereof.

The danger of the method is sufficiently obvious.
Life has a tendency to become a mere variegated pat-
tern, pleasing or discordant ; a Persian carpet ; or a
succession of sense impressions, in which the picture,
or any meaning which the picture can convey, is lost
in the search for agreeable combinations of curves and
colours. Against this danger is here set the sensitive-
ness to the emotional background, the conviction that
even if the impression be but for a moment, that moment
must represent the illumination of forces of eternal
significance. Love and Death, the passing of Change
and of Time, the high ardours of the spirit, the ques-
tioning ironies of man's existence and helplessness and
unknown destiny, are written over all these experiences
of life's lesser moods.

So that the experience itself is found to unfold large
issues. A vision is given, if for the moment only and
without judgment or approval, down the long vistas of
human life towards far horizons. A " Citizen " presents
the type of a life vanishing from England. The life of
effort, unwearying, narrow toil, acceptance of respon-
sibilities, is set over against " the zest for pleasure that
marks these days, the refusal to accept responsibilities,
the petulant protest against irksome tasks." A com-
panion picture is that of a woman pursuing always
" The Way," with " the glow of spiritual awakening
and expansion that came when the particular duties of
her life were fulfilled, and she could invite the whisper
of the mysteries." There are visions of the "Time of
Buttercups," with children dancing in the sunshine ; of
the death of a child of genius, a cripple, born in a

245

OF DEATH AND PITY

humble peasant home ; of the fires of an unforgettable
sorrow luminous after nineteen years. There is much
of London, its vastness, its desolation ; of its sombre
magnificence ; of its callousness and its charity, the
emanations of its million lives, the problem of its
present and its incalculable future ; of " her loneli-
ness," "her littleness," "her magic,'* "her terror,"
" her silence." And at the end the scene shifts into
the South, Spain and Italy, the little queer incidents of
travel, the conflict of diverse civilisations ; and the living,
blinking, blear-eyed, or with thoughts of memory and
of pity, around the memorials of the dead.

Everywhere Mr. Hind shows himself particularly
attracted to the revelation of some inner springs of
serenity, the secret of a life hidden from the modern
world. This he apprehends in the Salvation Army
lasses collecting alms in the Strand, in the old priest
upon the mountains, the monks as he sees them in his
garden, the poor who acquiesce and are content. The
apprehension of the permanent in the transitory, the
Divine unclouded by the "little smoke " of men's mad
wants and mean endeavours is the end of the story.

" I had entered Italy through Genoa," he concludes,
" her stainless marble palaces soaring proudly into the
sky. I left her by Venice, her stained marble palaces
shimmering sadly down into the water. I had seen
the fireflies all along the Umbrian valley, that candle
flickering in the dark church of the Frari, and Man-
tegna's last picture, on which he had inscribed,
' Nothing but the Divine endures ; the rest is smoke,' "
The vision was complete.

246

OF DEATH AND PITY

m

" The Sonnets of the Wingless Hours," that tragic
sequence of bewilderment and pain, have now been
revealed as born of the intimate experience of life's
sorrows. The protest and perplexity everywhere pre-
sent in them drives home under the force of this
knowledge, with a renewed appeal. Mr. William Sharp,
in his preface to the Canterbury edition of Mr. Lee
Hamilton's poems, has taken the world into the secret
of the laboratory in which were fused these shining
jewels. The author half-brother to "VernonLee"
at the beginning seemed to have all life before him in
most favoured circumstance. In the midst of his work
as diplomatist he was suddenly seized with that
dreadful disease from which Heine suffered years of
martyrdom. "From the first definite collapse in 1874
all hope was practically abandoned." He lay in a
semi-paralysed condition through the months and years
of agony. "For a long period suffering was too acute
to enable him to be read to ; conversations, messages,
letters, had to be condensed into a few essential words."
So passed twenty of the best years of manhood " in the
posture of the grave," years he compares to the old
torture of prisons whose walls steadily closed in upon
their victims, a little nearer every day. Pity itself can
only stand silent before such a tragedy.

And from this tragedy were born the " Sonnets of the
Wingless Hours." Nowhere is there weak complaint ;
nor any hope for a future which will vindicate the
purpose of the punishment, and provide adequate com-
pensation for the ruin of a lifetime. Charon now
sleeps, asserts the author, in the rushes by the deserted

247

OF DEATH AND PITY

shore, and no souls demand the services of the ferry of
the underworld. Heine, from his mattress-prison, like
some old heathen defying his tormenters, went down
into his grave hurling mockery and imprecation at the
God whose irony had overwhelmed him. But here
even the consolation of defiance is denied. For the
gods themselves have vanished into vapour, and the
walls of Heaven crumbled into dust. Henley deepened
the poignancy of his hospital rhymes by deliberate
roughness and jagged edges, telling of sudden agonies ;
and by the attitude, as of a startled child, towards all
the apparatus of pain. But in the sonnet which
demands more than any other medium perfection of
form, this method is impossible. The very smoothness
and simplicity of the language of this sequence of
suffering deepens the sense of sorrow and tears. His
muse has brought him

" A branch of dead sea fruit, not bay,
Plucked by the bitter waters of the soul."

Sometimes "bitterer is the cup than can be told," and
the only hope is for the quick coming of " death's
unstarred and hospitable night." Sometimes a sudden
passion of regret for a life thus wasted catches him by
the throat :

"And now my manhood goes where goes the song
Of captive birds, the cry of crippled things ;
It goes where goes the day that unused dies."

But for the most part there is patience and endurance,
gratitude for the little golden cup of " Poesy's wine of
gold," as the sufferer watches the years go one by
one in

" A garden where I lie beyond the flowers,
And where the snails outrace the creeping sun."

248

OF DEATH AND PITY

These fruits of the wingless hours, the children of
endurance and pain, have the intimacy and distinction
which should give them permanence in literature.
There are, indeed, flaws; hardly a sonnet is quite
perfect ; and flaws so obvious that one could mark, as it
were, with a pencil, the weak line or, in most cases, the
single word which mars the perfection of the whole.
But there is a splendour of style and thought charged
with an emotion sometimes passionate, always sincere,
which lift these sonnets from the ranks of the ephemeral,
and justify comparison even with the greatest.

Two qualities in particular they possess. The first is
the very sharp-cut impression of beauty of form and
colour. As all things stand clear in a storm -swept
atmosphere, so in the heightened sensitiveness of this
life of suffering Nature has become charged with &
shining brightness unheeded in the common ways of
men. The verse throbs with the colour contrasts of
Italy, Siena with its dizzy belfry stabbing the fiery air ;
evening in Tuscany ; the rich, hot scent of " old fir
forests heated by the sun " ; and all the magic of an
enchanted land.

Such a sonnet as " Twilight " containing, indeed,
two obvious weak lines abides in the memory for a
particular luminous atmosphere, for a moment harmoni-
ous with a mood in which sorrow itself has become
serene.

" A sudden pang contracts the heart of Day,
As fades the glory of the sunken sun.
The bats replace the swallows one by one ;
The cries of playing children die away.

Like one in pain, a bell begins to sway ;
A few white oxen, from their labour done,
Pass ghostly through the dusk ; the crone that spun

Beside her door, turns in, and all grows grey.
249

OF DEATH AND PITY

And still I lie, as I all day have lain,

Here in this garden, thinking of the time
Before the years of helplessness and pain ;

Or playing with the fringes of a rhyme,
Until the yellow moon, amid her train
Of throbbing stars, appears o'er yonder lime."

The greater poems are those in which these outward
visions are used to create an imagery conveying thought
charged with human emotion. The appeal of a personal
suffering passes into a universal cry. The sadness is
in the April air when a "breeze from Death's great
wings Shakes down the blossoms that the fruit trees
bear." The note of sorrow is heard, which runs through
all the music of the world. There are poems of most
delightful, child-like fancy, and a whole series of
imaginary experience of historical incident. But the
sonnets which stand out with a strength of emotional
power are those translating the individual experience
into the human cry. The eternal subjects of loveliness
and longing, time hurrying into nothingness the tran-
sitory generations, the sadness of the memory of all
vanished joy, the great dreams and desires of a race
which passes from essaying the walls of Heaven to the
silence of a little grave these are interpreted each in
terms of some visual picture. Such are the sonnets
that already have become famous. In " Sunken Gold"
long lost hopes are seen lying as on some reefy shelf,
" the gleam of irrecoverable gold " in the twilight of the
dim sea forests. All Souls' Day in the wintry evening
mingles the memory of the multitudes of the forgotten
dead with the figure of the sower, " grey and lone" in
the autumn fields. And the sonnets entitled " The
Wreck of Heaven " unfold a majestic vision of the ruin

250

OF DEATH AND PITY

of Paradise and its battlements and towers, with an
echo of the closing music of the Gdtterddmmerung in
its mingled exultation and despair.

" Ay, ay, the gates of pearl are crumbling fast ;
The walls of beryl topple stone by stone ;
The throngs of souls in white and gold are gone ;
The jasper pillars lie where they were cast.

The roofless halls of gold are dumb and vast ;

The courts of jacinth are for ever lone ;

Through shattered chrysolite the blind winds moan,
And topaz moulders to the earth at last."

Behind this vision of the destruction of the most
wonderful dream which has ever comforted the hearts of
men, there stands the earth and its realities ; and man,
uncheered by hope of a future glory, but enduring with
the old brave patience all the accidents of time, flinging
the grain into the furrow in hope of another harvest.

All admirers of the "Wingless Hours" must re-
joice at the wonderful thing which came at last to
their creator. " After twenty-one years of this pro-
longed half-life, the miraculous happened. The disease
commenced to wane. The invalid arose from a bed to a
new life ; thereafter, recovery to health became
complete." He travelled; love came to him; the note
of sadness and patience in his verse gave place to joy
and a renewed sense of the beauty of the world. In a
little volume called " Forest Notes," in which he has
collaborated with his wife, also a distinguished writer,
he has given the first taste of the product of this new
life. These little poems lack the sombre magnificence
of the sonnets, but they possess a delicacy and a charm
which will be welcome to all oppressed with the un-
answerable questions which the sonnets inevitably

251

OF DEATH AND PITY

raise. That happiness and a great contentment may
be given to the author of this little book for many
years must be the hope of all who can appreciate an
indomitable courage and suffering heroically borne.
That this contentment may be as fruitful in song as
the bitter past must be the desire of all lovers of
poetry.

IV

Modern poetry is feeling after the expression, in varied
form, of one of two emotions. The first is the ultimate
exultation and triumph of being, " the glory of the sum
of things." The second is the ultimate sadness and
regret of all that changes, the "idle tears" of "the
days that are no more." It is to the latter class that
Mrs. Marriott Watson belongs. Her work demands
recognition for its simplicity, pathos, and a rare gift of
sincerity. The influence of Henley is strong. The inevit-
able word is not indeed so successfully attained. Many of
these little detached lyrics leave the reader with a sense
of imperfection owing to some weakness often in the last
line or stanza. But in many there is a haunting
melody and beauty. "I am weary of all that passes "
is the cry of a great modern writer ; and something of
the pathos of that passing regret over the coming of
age and the death of the flowers at times poignant,
more often quiet as the sadness of a summer evening,
illuminates these little songs of loss and longing.

"After Sunset," the title of her latest volume, would
serve as a title to the whole. The light has fallen, and
there is silence ; only the shadows are creeping over the
hills and the signs are manifest of the coming night.
The song of the blackbird again and again recurs : " in

252

OF DEATH AND PITY

the dusk of the cold spring dawn," " Singing the Song
of Songs by the Gates of Dream," or telling the oft-told
story of " dreams and the dying spring." The verse is
woven of the material of sorrow : " the poor dead whom
none rememhereth " : Death's black pavilion in the
Unshapen Lands, and all the grey flowers in Death's
garden : the old wind which

" Goes murmuring still of unremembered seas,
And cities of the dead that men forget."

But more than the tragedy of death it is the tragedy
of change which has here found expression. There
will be many fairer days, but never again yesterday.
Flowers will again blossom, but not those flowers
which have faded. Other generations will rise into
exultant life, with perhaps the days of summer unending
and the roses blowing earlier in those after, happier
years. But the generations of the present are going into
silence and the generations of the past have gone.
That time itself should triumph over love and hope and
endless desire : that childhood should vanish and all its
absorbing interests ; that youth should be hurried forward
into age, and no effort stay the march of the intolerable
hours ; this is the irony of life which makes all human
experience a thing so helpless and piteous and transitory.
" Alas, that Spring should vanish with the rose " might
have been written on the title-page of all her poems.

"They are mowing the meadows now, and the whispering,
sighing

Song of the scythe breathes sweet on my idle ear,
Songs of old Summers dead, and of this one dying,

Roses on roses fallen, and year on year."

With this also comes the almost blinding contrast

253

OF DEATH AND PITY

between the renovating powers of Nature and the
little life of man. " You are not here, and yet it
is the Spring." No temporal consolation can satisfy
the hunger aroused by the mute mocking of such a
contrast.

" Youth comes no more for ever even although
The fields take flower again, and lilacs blow,
And pointed leaf-buds gather on the vine ;
Even although the sun should sail and shine
Bright as of old."

Here, indeed, is the protest which has rung down all the
centuries since that distant dawn when Moschus, crying
for his dead friend, found himself but mocked by the
mallow and the parsley and the renewal of all the
splendour of field and flower.

To the vigorous citizen desirous above all of banishing
uncomfortable thoughts, this emphasis of the tragedies
of change will appear morbid and futile. Outside the
garden life goes roaring by. In the dust and bustle
there is little time for the hauntings of memory or the
cultivation of the sorrow of passing things. "With this
world Mrs. Marriott Watson has little concern. There
is a strange sense of incongruity in the intrusion of such
a masterful figure as Lord Kitchener into her poems. In
her enchanted land the vision is of the ruined altar, the
deserted home, the white way that winds down the hill,
the cry of children that are gone out into the night.

Above all here is the cry of the children. The songs
of childhood have an especial grace and charm. Some
have the tenderness of mingled smiles and tears, as in
the sight of the discarded toys and all the child's for-
gotten world. Some have the deeper note of longing for
the childhood vanished in the natural growth to maturity :

254

OF DEATH AND PITY

the disappearance of the " small, down-vestured head " :
"the innocent eyes": "the sweet, impetuous little
feet." And some have the note of anguish which wails
round the most unendurable of all the outrages of death,
in the calling through the night of the ruined heart for
a little child struck down by those merciless hands

" Leave the door upon the latch she could never reach it,
You would hear her crying, crying there till break of day,
Out on the cold moor 'mid the snows that bleach it,
Weeping as once in the long years past away."

Such is the garden "after sunset." The night and its
shadows have not yet come. The sadness is tempered by
the charm of the dying day. Tenderness and compassion
walk more blithely than in the glare of the afternoon.
And all the magic of the evening gathers round that
land of longing and tears, which stretches its horizon
into far distances when once the sun has dropped behind
the hills.

255

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

11 For the world is not to be won by anything except on those
conditions with which the Kingdom of Heaven first came.
Vbhat conquers must have those wJio devote themselves to it:
who prefer it to all other things : who are proud to suffer for
it : who can bear anything so that it goes forward."

R. W. CHURCH.

THE BELIGION OF THE CITY

AT the beginning of the twentieth century two
attempts on a large scale have been made to
estimate the religion of London. The results have in
the main confirmed the statements of those who assert
that the condition of these familiar, crowded populations
is in reality as obscure as that of China or Mexico. The
one was statistical, the other impressionist. Facts
limited to bare numbers were given by the Daily News
census. A vast complexity of conversations, testimonies,
experiences was provided by Mr. Booth's seven volumes.
It is to the student of opinion and social change that
the first of these the numbering of the religions of
London will prove of lasting value. Only advertise-
ment, cynicism, or vulgar curiosity benefits from the
announcement that Mr. A's church (heralding itself as
exercising enormous spiritual influence) gathers four
hundred worshippers every Sunday, or that Mr. B's
church (proclaiming a similar success) gathers forty.
The tabulated results of the Census have been used as
the basis for crude and ill-informed deductions. They
will form the material in the future for the demonstra-
tion of all manner of preconceived ideas. But this
is the common fate of statistic. Let the figures be
taken for what they profess to be the record of the
numbers of attendance, men, women, and children, at
morning and evening service on certain Sundays in the
years 1902-3 in every public religious edifice in London.
No claim is made that these figures give adequate basis

259

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

for comparison of the spiritual influence of different
individual churches or of the aggregate of organised
religions. One church, in a poor district, attracts a
congregation by a distribution of cocoa and slabs of
bread at the commencement or the conclusion of the
service. Another, in a comfortable suburb, fills its pews
with an audience to whom church-going is the custom
and the fashion, a display of smart clothing, the occupa-
tion of a seat hired by the year, or a method of killing
the boredom of an idle Sunday. A third, hidden in a
back street, gathers together thirty or forty poor men and
women who support the expenses with their scanty
earnings, and meet for edification or for worship outside
the sphere of both fashion and material benefit. There
is no common denominator of religious aspiration which
will measure three such congregations as these ; but in
dispassionate estimate of figures they are of necessity
weighed together as if each individual attendance were
of similar account.

Yet the figures themselves are of quite extraordinary
interest and value an interest and value which will
increase as the memories of London in 1908 fade into an
almost fabulous past. They have stamped in permanent
form certain facts of the spiritual energies of this strange
and perplexing city in this particular period of change.
Corrected by personal knowledge, and retranslated from
their bloodless skeleton of information into terms of
human effort, tenacity, and aspiration, they become
charged with a romance and significance paralleled by
few other such tables of numbers and names.

Mr. Charles Booth's investigation has not been
received with so universal an acceptance. Comments,
often angry, have been evoked by the somewhat sweeping
strictures of his investigators. The personal impression

260

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

of curate or minister seems often to have formed the
main basis of judgment. Pretentiousness, noisiness,
vulgarity, produce emphatic condemnation ; the critics
would have done well to remember that pretentiousness,
noisiness and vulgarity have often been associated with
a real and vigorous religion. Mr. Booth deliberately (I
am inclined to think, rightly) rejected the statistical
method as misleading in the estimation of something so
elusive and intangible as spiritual influence. But as a
corrective to many of his statements the Census figures
are quite invaluable. No serious student can neglect
either the one or the other. Read first the seven
volumes of Mr. Booth ; examine and analyse the figures
of this Census ; make yourself personally familiar with at
least a few selected districts of different types the
wealthy, the suburban, the artisan, the poor : you will
then be in a position to offer at least some tentative
suggestions towards an estimate of the religious condition
of this great congeries of cities which we term London.

In the commencement of examination it is desirable
to attempt an estimate of the characteristic classes of
the people of the city. We may omit the specialised
class of the West End : that particular " golden " area
in which is condensed the product of all the spoil of
Empire. Religion has never been the serious concern of
the wealthy. They play with it as they play with life.
They contribute the funds of impersonal charities, they
discuss the sufferings of the poor, they patronise all creeds
offering a new sensation Christian Science, ^Esthetic
Catholicism, Spiritualism, Revivalism. It is sincere in so
far as any sincerity in such a life is possible. But it in

261

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

no way essentially differs from the homage which this
class is always prepared to pay to the accepted gods of a
nation. The real problem of the future of religion in
the city is being fought out amongst those classes
which make up the grey matrix of labour of which that
city is composed.

For purposes of investigation this solid background of
the city's energies can be split into four main divisions.
First we may note the " poor " in the proper sense of
the term ; those, in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's
now famous phrase, living "on the verge of hunger" if
not "on the verge of starvation." These are the
subjects of Messrs. Booth and Rowntree's dismal
statistics. They are a class which only emerges above
the political horizon when some energetic statesman is
composing a moving peroration or essaying a new
policy. They are the forlorn multitude of those who
have failed. They are most numerous in South and
East London, forming great wedges and masses along
the riverside, and collecting in scattered pools or isolated
streets in all the other boroughs. They form the ready
prey of church and mission. Each particular district in
which they herd is swarming with rival agencies essaying
their bodily sustenance and the salvation of their souls.
A continuous vast river of charitable help pours through
the channels of these missions into every corner and
crevice of their homes. Bread, clothing, boots, vegetable
soup, grocery tickets, monetary assistance, fall some-
times, like the rain of heaven, upon the just and unjust,
sometimes only upon those who are willing to make a
decent return in attendance at public worship or mothers'
meetings. This source of supply is eked out in most
cases with casual labour or the more desolating forms of
unskilled employment, with outdoor relief, with the pro-

262

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

ducts of home industries, the earnings of school children,
and the munificent wage earned by the free unorganised
labour of women. The children are innumerable. The
death rate of infants is high, but a sufficient number sur-
vive to ensure the transmission of the rickety type,
stunted physique and fragile or diseased constitution, to
the generations of the future. The individuals rise or
fall. The class remains, a stagnant pool of low-grade
life which is slowly extending its borders, and swelling
its multitudes to a bulk which finally will compel atten-
tion to the menace of its futility.

The second class makes up the matrix of which the
great mass of working London is composed. It is the
class of decent working men, from the highly paid artisan
to the better paid labourer. Here is the "poor" as it
appears to the rich, lumping into one common category
all below the status of retail tradesmen. It more than
fills the block dwellings and cottages in which it is
housed, and it is continually flowing over through leaks and
gaps into the suburbs which surround it on all sides, to
the infinite disgust of the original inhabitants of these
desirable regions. It works for the most part away from
its residence, and spends much of its leisure in journeys
to and fro. It is on the whole contented with its life.
But its intel igence and vitality seem partially sapped by
its crowded city existence, and it manifests none of the
somewhat aggressive social and political vigour which is
characteristic of a similar class in other cities of England.
At present it is largely country bred. It still shows
traces of the open air and the life of the fields. But
each year the rural elements diminish, the urban
increase. It is a race passing in bulk through the
greatest change in the life of humanity, the change in
which nature vanishes from the horizon and is replaced

263

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

by the perpetual presence of man. It represents at the
present a stage in this transition, with stability, acquies-
cence, and the peculiar city characteristics not yet fully
attained.

The third class is one often overlooked, whose neglect
has originated some of the more absurd generalisations
upon the life of the poor. In all the boroughs, poor as
well as rich, lining all the main roads and many of the
side streets is the class of tradesmen who minister to the
needs of the vast populations which are hidden behind.
These form a prosperous bourgeois class, possessing con-
siderable vigour and enterprise, and very sharply divided
in interest and outlook from the poor and the artisan
who do business with them. In the poorest boroughs
they form an aristocracy of wealth. In the wealthier
boroughs they are less conspicuous, aud there are social
grades from which they are excluded. But they are
numerous in all, and in all offer a very marked contribu-
tion to the religious life of London.

Lastly, in the outlying districts we find the suburban
dweller, forming, on the hills principally of the South
and the North, a class of quite peculiar and specialised
life and characteristics. He is a product of those
economic conditions which have made London the
banking centre and clearing-house of the world. He is
a dependant of the City, to which he journeys every
morning. He leads an entirely sedentary existence,
writing other men's letters, adding other men's accounts,
each a cog or link in the machinery of other men's ideas-
The energy pent up in this remarkable toil is reserved
for the hours of freedom. There is active home life,
strong family affection, little gardens and ornamented
villas, ambition for the children. A certain artificiality
distinguishes such an existence, a divorce from reality

264

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

which only intrudes at intervals of love or suffering or
death. Vigour may be more conspicuous than breadth
of outlook or intellectual agility, and there are often set
up quite astonishing standards of "respectability" in
politics and religion. But there are compensating ele-
ments in a widespread material comfort, enjoyment of
simple pleasures, and a very real and active religious life,
probably stronger here than in any other class of the
community. It is here that the churches and chapels
are crowded, that their activities blossom out on week-
days into mutual improvement associations, debating
clubs, and innocuous amusement. The orthodox religions
receive a willing adherence which has resisted success-
fully all the disintegrating forces of changes in thought
and environment. This is the class beyond all others
where the particular characteristics find expression in the
edifices it has reared for its worship and the nature of
the services it generously maintains within them.

Let us see what light the Religious Census will
throw upon the spiritual condition of this world of
working humanity. Although it would be quite inac-
curate to judge the influences exercised from particular
churches by the simple comparison of the numbers of
worshippers ; and although, undoubtedly, a religious
enthusiasm focussed in the Sunday gatherings diffuses
through great numbers who never or rarely are actually
present ; yet on the whole we may say that the
organised religious and ethical bodies stand practically
for the active spiritual enterprise of London. Once I
had expected it otherwise thinking that the widespread
break-up of faith and the influence of destructive
criticism would have created a large class of persons
unable conscientiously to attach themselves to church
or chapel, but eager for ethical progress and the asser-

265

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

tion of the supremacy of the things of the spirit. But
experience has failed to discover any number of such
individuals. Many, indeed, pass through a stage in
which all definite religions are judged and condemned
as insincere or untrue. But either interest in all
ultimate questions vanishes, or the inquirer in time
finds himself drawn to some church or congregation.
Even those who are unable to make any positive
spiritual affirmation may unite in some positivist
society or ethical fellowship. The influence of such
bodies, indeed, containing some of the most sincere and
devoted of men and women, is altogether underestimated
by the meagre numbers of attendance. Outside there
is much vague social discontent, and often a feeling of
bitterness against all organised religions. But such
feelings, however praiseworthy, are not in themselves
guarantees of spiritual or moral energy. The man who
will abstain from church-going, and informs you with
complacency that his religion is that of the Sermon on
the Mount, is usually distinguished by little but an
amiable unwillingness to do conscious injury to those
who have not injured him, and by a determination at
least not to love himself less than his neighbour. As
symbols and representatives of whatever spiritual life
still remains in London, we may quite confidently limit
our outlook to the religious bodies who are dealt with in
the Census return.

To come then to the facts. Let us first consider the
bare aggregate of numbers.

In the County area of London one man out of every
twelve, and one woman out of every ten, attends some
form of Divine worship each Sunday morning ; and one
man in every ten, and one woman in every seven, attends
each Sunday evening.

266

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

And if we may accept the figures given by the super-
intendent of the Census of 38 per cent, making a double
attendance, we can lead on to the further statement :

In London one man out of every six, and one woman
out of every Jive, attends some place of worship at least
once every Sunday.

I must confess that this is a far larger proportion
than I should have anticipated. Living amongst a
population which has practically abandoned church-
going, I had mechanically interpreted my own experi-
ence into the larger whole. The twelfth man who goes
off to church at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning had
escaped my vision. As a rough estimate I should have
given anything from 1 to 4 per cent, as the total
actively Christian population of labouring London.
One is grateful to the Census if for this alone the
revelation of larger numbers of attendance than one
had dared to hope however much later examination
may show such attendance to be meaningless and
conventional.

Let us pass from these massed aggregates which
mean little to the more interesting and difficult analysis
of classes to the attempt to estimate how these wor-
shippers are divided amongst the main grades of society.
Here is the ready field of wild deduction. Many critics
knowing dimly that Southwark (say) is poor and
Chelsea wealthy, have concluded that the statistics of
the borough of Southwark show the statistics of church
attendance of the poor, and those of the borough of
Chelsea that of the rich. Some have thus discovered
a fixed proportion of church-goers in all classes.
Others will tell you confidently of the demonstration
by such numbers of the strength of some particular
denomination amongst the poor or the rich. Such

267

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

crude deductions are entirely erroneous. On the one
hand, a poor borough may contain places of worship
which attract well-to-do worshippers from a wide area.
Southwark, for example, contains an Anglican and a
Roman Catholic cathedral, as well as the great chapel
made famous through the English-speaking world by
the pastorate of Charles Spurgeon, whose enormous
audience of 8,625 represents a similar cathedral
gathering. In the poorest district of Lambeth, again,
is the great church presided over by Mr. F. B. Meyer,
which draws a well-to-do and intelligent audience from
all the southern suburbs. And on the other hand, such
a statement altogether neglects the comfortable class of
tradesmen and the middle class who live in all the
poorer boroughs, and provide perhaps the most ardent
adherents of many flourishing religions. Any one inti-
mate with such a district will know that it is this class
in the main which contributes such worshippers as the
churches and chapels are able to gather together in
working-class districts. The places of worship line the
main thoroughfares. Their frequenters are respectable,
well-dressed men and women, the dwellers in those
main thoroughfares and the better-class squares and
streets that remain undestroyed. Investigate every
place of worship down (say) Walworth Road from the
" Elephant " to Camberwell Green the heart of a poor
district. In all the varied centres of religion, whose
buildings are thickly studded at close intervals, you will
find no signs of obvious poverty. In the districts
behind, in some obscure gathering of Primitive Metho-
dists or Bible Christians, you may discover the class
you are seeking. But in all central South London,
the district with which I am most intimate, I have
only seen the poor in bulk collected at two places of

268

religious worship Mr. Meakin's great hall in Ber-
mondsey, and St. George's Roman Catholic Cathedral
at Southwark an object-lesson in (amongst other
things) the wisdom of the permission of the late Arch-
bishop of Canterbury for the use of incense " for fumi-
gatory purposes." In London as a whole apart from
certain isolated and exceptional instances I have no
hesitation in asserting that it is the middle classes
which attend church and chapel, the working-classes
and the poor who stay away.

This can be illustrated by comparison, not of the
large areas of the boroughs, but of some definite
working-class area with some suburban district. I
have been at some pains to make such a comparison,
whose figures are appended. The working-class area
I have chosen is a triangular patch in the centre of
South London, bounded by three great thoroughfares.
It is a normal crowded district with which I am per-
sonally familiar, varying from the lowest poverty to the
comparative comfort of skilled industry, and bounded by
the middle-class shopkeepers in the main roads. If
anything, it should be unusually favoured in its religious
effort, for it is the scene of some very interesting experi-
ments. Several of the public-school and Cambridge
College missions are here, and the well-known Browning
Hall settlement. The churches are high, low, and
broad. The clergy are Tory, Radical, and Socialist;
they include amongst them borough councillors, guar-
dians, and two of the best known Radical parsons of
London. All types of Nonconformity are represented,
including a flourishing Baptist and a flourishing
Wesley an Chapel.

To compare with this I selected a suburban district
in South Dulwich and Forest Hill, which is as yet

269

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

comparatively free from the inroad of the working
man.

The figures for the two districts compare as follows :

ADULT ATTENDANCE.

Pop.

Church.

Noncon-
formist.

Total.

Percent-
age of
Pop.

Working-class District .
Suburban District .

99,261
32,096

2,289
6,686

4,255
3,147

6,644
9,833

6-6
306

The figures become more striking, perhaps, if areas
of equal population are compared. The single parish
of St. Mary Magdalene, Old Kent Road, contains almost
as large a population as five of the suburban parishes.
But the church attendances are different.

ADULT ATTENDANCE.

Pop.

Church.

Noncon-
formist.

Total.

Percent-
age of
Pop.

St. Mary's, Walworth .

20,142

189

1,089

1,278

6

Five Dulwioh and

Sydenham Parishes

21,373

3,320

2,858

6,178

29

When it is further remembered that the suburban
district undoubtedly also supplies worshippers to a
number of churches and chapels outside its borders,
and that by scraping off a layer of middle-class houses
from the main streets of Walworth you would probably
diminish your church attendance by at least two-thirds'
I think the illustration is striking of the difference in

270

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

habits of church attendance between the prosperous and
the poor.

An isolated example such as this is indeed not con-
clusive. But I would ask any critic still doubtful to
work out similar calculations from the Census returns.
Let him compare Bermondsey with Lewisham, inner
with outer Lambeth, Deptford with Blackheath he
will find similar results. The results were, indeed, well
known to those familiar with the life of the poor, and
are continually asserted in Mr. Booth's investigation.
The new city race of workers is developing apart
from the influences of religion. The spiritual world
has vanished from their vision. The curtain of
their horizon has descended round the life of toil
which constitutes their immediate universe. Here and
there, widely scattered, you may find a successful
religious community of the poor; but these are mere
isolated instances in an area of grey indifference.
The energy, determination, and devotion put forth by
adherents of all the religious bodies to convert some
portion of this vast multitude, is one of the most notice-
able displays of self-sacrificing effort to be found in
modern England. Every expedient is essayed, from
the guilds and fraternities, processions and banners of
" advanced " churches to the antics of " Jumping Jack"
or " Salvation Joe " of a different school of Christianity.
The wealthier members of the varied religions generously
pour subscriptions and material gifts for the same
arduous task. The best of the younger members of
the Church of England undertake work amongst the
poor, and certainly the standard of the clergy in the
central districts where the churches are empty need
not fear comparison with the standard in the outlying
suburbs where the churches are crammed. If the

271

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

works done in London to-day, one is inclined to assert,
had been done in Sodom and Gomorrah, they would
have repented in sackcloth and ashes. To all this
the great unknown multitude remains unresponsive.
So far as a conscious spiritual life is concerned the
results seem almost negligible. The key to the heart
of the City has not yet been found. Its interminable
streets and desert of crowded dwellings wait for some
outpouring of the spirit as yet withholden. Against its
amiable acquiescence and passive resistance to the
exhortations, threatenings, and promises of the
churches all these energies beat themselves in vain.
The indifference to religion is, indeed, accompanied by
indifference to all intellectual effort, to political and
social action, to the advancement of any ideal cause.
" It was supposed," is one verdict, " that as men would
not come to church they would go to the hall of science.
Not a bit of it. Of the two they would prefer the
church, but what they really want is to be left alone."
" The fact is," said a lady to a friend of mine who was
canvassing for a vote, " me and my 'usben' don't take
no interest in any think."

Amongst the third class of residents the middle
classes, stretching in a kind of skeleton framework
through the cities of labour, so strangely members of
this unique community, yet alien from all its hopes
and desires we can recognise a strong and vigorous
religious life. It develops mainly an individualistic
gospel ; stern ; a doctrine that every man should help
himself, and that if he fails it is his own fault. It
recognises an "old-fashioned" teaching heaven and
hell as realities, unaffected by the destructive influences
of modern ideas. Here, if anywhere, is the survival in
London of the Puritan element, the distrust of worldly

272

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

pleasures, the looking forward to the salvation of the
elect, escaping, though hardly, from a world destined
for everlasting fire. This population fills the great
Nonconformist tabernacles which occupy so conspicuous
a position in the religious life of London. It is
interesting to see how its existence causes a reversal
of the standards recognised elsewhere clergymen, for
example, repeatedly explaining to Mr. Booth that their
wealthy people were "too well off" for the Church of
England, or that the edifice is "placed in a wealthier
part among people who are Dissenters or nothing."
" These churches," is the verdict on one district and
one religious body it may be extended to all "are
mainly supported by the lower middle class ; with the
working class their difficulties begin, and in the streets
that show a really poor element all religious efforts fail,
here as elsewhere." The summary of a particularly
successful Baptist tabernacle in Camberwell is written
large over the whole of London. " Few are rich, for
the rich have left the neighbourhood ; none are poor,
for the poor do not come, and a mission started for their
sake has not been a success. But as a middle-class
organisation the church is the centre of a vigorous
congregational life." In these districts at least, Non-
conformists form the aristocracy, and the Church and
the Roman Catholics work with a lower social stratum.
In our fourth class the residents of the suburbs we
have perhaps the largest proportion of church atten-
dance in any district in London. Practically the whole
population attends religious service on Sunday. Places
of all religions are crowded with overflowing congrega-
tions. The disintegrating influences which have swept
over Society and the West have here as yet scarcely
penetrated. Sunday amusement is still sternly dis-

273 T

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

couraged. Sunday is made as unpleasant a day as is
possible for the ungodly who refuse to recognise the
obligations of worship. The record everywhere is of
activity and enterprise. Munificent sums have been
spent on new buildings and endowments. Church
attendance is the fashion, pews are rented for families ;
the chief difficulty is to provide accommodation for the
increasing demands. Adjacent to each other, indeed,
we have here two populations, each inhabiting an
entirely separate universe. In the centre the minister
may talk with the tongue of man and angel, and the
church remains deserted. In the suburbs he may roll
out commonplace platitudes, and the church is crammed.
"A certain class will come to church," is the summary
of one minister, " provided you do not positively repel
them ; while another class cannot be induced to come
at all." In the suburbs we hear of districts in which
" almost every one in this neighbourhood goes to some
place of worship"; others where "you have only to
build a church and it will be filled, unless you drive the
people away."

The conclusions of Mr. Booth and the statistical
Census now further sift themselves under classes.

In London the poor (except the Roman Catholic poor)
do not attend service on Sunday, though there are a few
churches and missions which gather some, and forlorn
groups can be collected by a liberal grunting of relief.

The working man does not come to church. A few
small communities of Primitive Methodists, Baptists,
Salvationists, and similar bodies, as a general rule
represent his contribution to the religious life of the
nation.

The tradesmen and middle class of the poorer
boroughs exhibit an active religious life, mainly gathered

274

in the larger Nonconformist bodies, especially the
Baptists.

The residents in the suburbs crowd their churches and
chapels, and support with impartiality and liberality
all forms of organised religion.

Before passing to conclusions, there are some further
points of interest to be noted concerning the region of
religious effort and failure.

First, I think the statistics conclusively demonstrate
the failure of what I may call the " mission " system.
The original conception was an idea of a very attrac-
tive simplicity. The parish church or the mother
chapel was to he the place of meeting of a cultured and
comfortable audience. These paid for the seats, and
were edified by the ministrations of a cultured and
comfortable pastor. " The poor will not come to
church." The presence of their squalor, if they found
their way in, would, indeed, be a little embarrassing.
So in the poor part of the parish a " mission-hall " is
built, where the curate or the faithful laymen of the
church may extemporise popular and breezy addresses,
and conduct with the aid of an harmonium popular and
breezy hymns. The mother congregation will contri-
bute generously to this necessary supplement to their
efforts, the lady members will assist in the singing or
become district visitors, and the hall will be a centre
for the liberal distribution of meat, clothing, and
coals. One may perhaps rejoice at the failure of this
vicious system, as revealed by these investigations.
Mr. Booth brings a sweeping indictment against
the whole collection of shabby, dilapidated mission-
halls of tin or drab brick, which he found offered
as homes for the spiritual nourishment of the poor.
And in practically every borough the attendance

275

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

of adults at these lamentable erections is found to be
approaching the vanishing point. Rarely does it reach
a hundred. 43, 34, 16 in the Anglican, 8 in the
Baptist, 41, 41 in the Congregational, I find the
mission-hall attendance in one district. In another are
ten Baptist missions with an average morning adult
attendance of 7, and evening of 33 ; in another five
Anglican with a morning average of 13, and evening of
50. Not on such lines, it may safely be asserted, will
the news of the kingdom of God come to the working
populations of London.

A second noteworthy feature is the power seemingly
possessed by the old parish churches to gather congre-
gations within their walls. They stand, for the most
part, of a Georgian or early Victorian architecture, like
great ships washed by the flood of humanity which has
swept around them ; built for a time when Walworth
was a fashionable suburb, or Stepney surrounded by
gardens, or Woolwich a flourishing, self-centred country
town. They awaken memories of a vanished past,
before the torrent of poverty swept down on the fields
and marshes and destroyed, like the lava stream,
all green trees and every living thing. Something,
however, of their quaintness and old-world atmosphere
seems to have clung around them. The services them-
selves are nearly all of a " moderate " type, most
characteristic of an Established Church and early
Victorian religion. Most of these parish churches,
with their type of worship now almost superseded by
modern, energetic innovations, exhibit a noteworthy
number of Sunday attendances.

A third item is the manifest tendency of the Noncon-
formist worshippers to collect together into strong
centres that centralising system which is inevitable

276

where preaching is so emphasised and the stimulus and
guidance of the pulpit so much desired. I have no
douht the tendency implies loss as well as gain that
the smaller chapels round, which are emptied to swell
the great congregations, must inevitably suffer from
depression and a sense of failure. In Woolwich, for
example, we may note Mr. Wilson's great tabernacle,
with an adult attendance of 1,669 ; and ten other
Baptist chapels dividing 1,520 between them, or an
average at each service of 76 persons. In Southwark
Mr. Spurgeon attracts a magnificent congregation of
1,054 adults in the morning and 1,954 in the evening;
the seven adjacent Baptist chapels obtain between them
873 in the morning and 1,769 in the evening, an
average of 188 per service; while the adjacent four
Congregational churches are occupied by but 628, or an
average of 78. Mr. Meakin's hall in Bermondsey,
again, with its 1,217 evening attendance, presents a
sharp contrast to adjacent Wesleyan churches with
congregations of 12, 130, and 19, and to the desolate
condition of churches and chapels of other bodies in the
same desolate region. Undoubtedly there are high
compensating advantages. The power of the great
preacher is multiplied. The stimulus of these vast
multitudes is invaluable to the bodies of Christians
scattered and small in the surrounding indifference.
The sight of the congregation of the Newington Taber-
nacle singing hymns on Sunday evening on the steps of
the great edifice is a guarantee to the heedless stream
which passes by that there are some who still believe in
their religion. But \vork under the shadow of these
cathedral gatherings in the humbler chapels is a de-
pressing experience. The congregation slowly melts
away, as the old faithful depart and the younger mem-

277

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

bers are drawn to more obvious attractions. I know of
few more depressing sights than the gathering of the
few score dejected faithful scattered through buildings
of size and pretension from which all the life has
departed.

The parochial system of the Established Church, with
its strong emphasis on local ties, is a resistent against
this tendency in the Anglican community; the com-
paratively unimportant place occupied by the preacher
is another. Undoubtedly, however, the Anglican atten-
dances suffer as well as the Nonconformist from the
attractive influences of these gigantic tabernacles and
mission-halls. One is driven more and more to the
conclusion that under present conditions the percentage
of attendance at church to population in London ia
about a fixed number. You may, by special effort of
preaching, music, or excitement, draw a large and
active congregation. But you have done so by empty-
ing the churches of your neighbours. The water is not
increased in quantity, but merely decanted from bottle
to bottle. In the cases mentioned above, the great
chapels with their allied branches and their immense
activity, I can very gladly testify from personal know-
ledge to the real spiritual enthusiasm and benefit
which they diffuse. There are, however, other popular
attractive services which must be received with less
unqualified praise. Efforts are made, wholesale,
reckless, sensational,- to excite an emotional vigour.
The influence in any case appears transitory. The
adherents of the churches are lured from their less
exciting services, dosed with a kind of spiritual intoxi-
cation, and left to recover from the debauch as best
they can. Energetic, well-meaning persons, seeing
London as a heathen city, hire large halls, flash

278

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

lantern slides before the eyes of the crowd, advertise
" Salvation Jack " to preach on the subject " Catch 'em
alive." The success is phenomenal, and they go to
sleep at nights convinced that they have advanced by
their efforts the conversion of England. People who
had attended humble churches and chapels, often miles
away, are drawn to this new spiritual excitement. In
many cases they never return to their old membership,
finding the old methods humdrum and unstimulating.
I am sure I am in agreement with the majority of the
ministers in London when I say that experience has
created a distrust of the large "undenominational"
mission, with its lavish charities and sensational appeals,
the special advertisement and religious excitement, and
all efforts to reach " the outcast who has never heard of
the Gospel" (who scarcely exists in London) by the
satisfaction of his stomach or the adaptation of the
methods of the circus and the music-hall.

Another feature of interest is the evidence of the
progress of Ritualism and " advanced" doctrine amongst
the suburbs of London. This was a surprise to me. I
had thought these energies mainly exhibited amongst the
rich who were attracted by its ceremonial and the poor
who welcomed its gospel of Socialism and fellowship.
But here are strong churches among the middle classes
churches mostly built in recent years, and by the
worshippers themselves without external assistance
evidently providing something which their congregations
desire. Here, if anywhere, is to be found the Eitualistic
grocer whom Sir William Harcourt once challenged his
ecclesiastical opponents to produce. The suburbs, I
should have thought, would have remained the last
home of Protestantism, and around the northern boun-
daries of London they remain entirely faithful to the

279

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

evangelical tradition. But all through the south and
the west we find largely attended " Catholic " churches.
All new districts of mixed population seem to be
efficient fields for these newer energies. It is a note-
worthy factor in the estimation of the changing aspects
of London's religious life, a movement still progressing
towards an end no one can clearly foresee.

Many other striking features are revealed as by a
sudden light thrown into a universe of cloud and dark-
ness. There is the smallness of number and magnitude
of congregation of the Roman Catholic churches, reveal-
ing both the poverty of this body and the readiness of
its members to travel considerable distances to fulfil
their obligations of attendance at Mass. There is the
astonishing blossoming out of offshoots and branches of
the main stream of Christian life into all kinds of quaint
minor sects, each with its own specific doctrine and
place of meeting. These become most pronounced in
the suburbs, as in Camberwell, where we find the New
Jerusalem Church with 45 morning worshippers, the
Calvinistic Independents with 153, the Christadelphians
with 49, besides such less conspicuous bodies as the
Holiness Gospel Mission with 15, the Christian Band
Hall with 70, and two branches of Spiritualists with 13
and 39 adherents. Again, there is evidence of the com-
parative failure of " undenominational " services, with a
series of minute attendances ; the inability of the Salva-
tion Army to attract inside audiences ; and the great
contrast, in the case of the Wesleyan Methodists,
between attendances at the new centres of the forward
movement and the old circuit chapels.

Finally, it may be asked, What is the relation
between the figures of attendance and actual religious
influence? How far can the activity of a Church in

280

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

districts be measured by or limited to the number of
adherents here given ? This is a question largely a
matter of personal impression for which there are no
exact data. My own opinion is that, in translation into
the world of real values, the numbers for the central
districts are considerably too small, those for the
suburban considerably too large. This is due, on the
one hand, to the far wider diffusive influence of the
Church in the poorer districts than that which is repre-
sented by the handful of worshippers ; on the other, to
what I might call the greater religious intensity of the
worshippers who do attend where church-going is out of
fashion than of those who attend where it is the recog-
nised custom. The Church in the vast city is a great
engine of civilisation. There is a network and
machinery of social organisation clubs, guilds, boys'
brigades, mothers' meetings, improvement societies.
It may indeed be questioned how far a Church is
justified in turning its energies from its definite spiritual
mission to the more practical work of the provision of
pleasure and the amelioration of the hard life of the
poor. But certainly it is undoubted that civilisation
would be considerably delayed were this apparatus
removed. This activity has earned for the Church the
friendliness and toleration of vast populations still
impervious to its spiritual message, and a few years ago
in an attitude of open hostility. An overwhelming
proportion of the children attend catechism and Sunday
School and are launched into life with such cloudy
religious conceptions as these institutes are able to
provide. The clergy are frequent and often welcome
visitors. Each individual is present at service at least
at his baptism, his marriage, and his funeral ; and
occasionally on other special occasions harvest festi-

281

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

vals, confirmations, and the last night of the year.
The services of the minister of religion are requisitioned
in times of trouble or illness, and few would willingly
die without at least one visit from the clergyman. All
this means a real if diffusive influence. Keligious ideas
are still " in the air " ; and the message of the Church,
the consciousness of sin, the need for repentance, and
the expectation of future judgment, have not yet
entirely vanished from the horizon of London.

I should he inclined to assert again that, in quality,
our attendance within the congested area more than
compensates for the quantity of the region beyond.
We come, if at all, because our religion is real, and
amid the manifested contempt of our neighbours. In
the smaller churches and chapels at least there are no
meretricious attractions to lead us thus to defy public
opinion. Suburban religion is largely of a different
character. Much of it is the mere conventional homage
to the accepted gods of the community. And even the
section that is honest and deliberate is often partly
lacking in certain essentials of an active and aggressive
Christian endeavour. It upholds a decent life and a
clean moral standard, with much individual personal
piety. But it is far too content to limit its outlook to
its own family or church, heedless of the chaos of
confusion and failure which lies at its very doors. It
regards with disapproval and often with contempt this
world of poverty with its dumb demand for aid. It is
generous in charity, but no appeal for justice in the
name of the forgotten poor goes forth with united voice
from the churches of London. It is content to cultivate
its own garden, to save its own soul. It is loth to
identify its interests with those of its less successful
neighbours. The challenge, " Which think ye was

282

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

neighbour to him that fell amongst thieves ? " remains
unaccepted. For this neglect of obvious Christian duty
its loss is at least as great as the loss of those it
declines to aid. It becomes more and more cut off
from the realities to which a living religion has
always appealed. It draws the line tight round its own
border, and endeavours to satisfy with missions and
gifts of money the obligation of personal service and of
a campaign for justice to all the desolate and oppressed.
It has remained up till now unaffected by destructive
criticism and the changes of thought and outlook which
have so ravaged the orthodox religions in other regions.
But there are not wanting signs of the approach of the
disturbance. It has still to pass through a time of trial
in which it will be tested to its foundations. Material-
ism, the lust for pleasure, the modern impatience with a
definite creed, are slowly creeping into this vigorous
suburban area ; and the negative assertions of science
and biblical criticism are creating centres of local
disquietude. If the prevailing type of religion largely
withers before such forces as these, it will be because it
has set itself apart in comfort, content with a personal
creed of salvation; because it has felt no passionate
impulse to assert a common fellowship with the less
fortunate who are lying at its doors no call to
right the wrongs which, in the words of a modern
reformer, " cry continually into the ears of the Lord
God of Sabaoth."

We have enough facts, I think, to justify us in the
statement that the religious life of England at the dawn
of the century occupies a quite unparalleled position
amid that of the nations of Western Europe. In the
case of all other countries, religion has been practically
abandoned by the rich and successful, and is still

283

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

grasped with tenacity and devotion by the masses of the
poor. In the cities, indeed, amongst the male popula-
tions of the working classes, the historical faiths of
Christianity have heen replaced to a large extent by the
newer creed of Socialism. But Socialism, with its
sense of fellowship, its demand for the merging of the
individual life in the success of the cause, its uplifting
of an ideal condition of justice, and its effort towards a
day of better things, in many ways provides a back-
ground to life and the vision of a larger horizon.
But in England exactly the reverse conditions prevail.
The claims of religion are still acknowledged by
the rich and governing classes. They are inoperative
amongst the lives of the poor. No dreams of a reno-
vated society have entered the chambers left empty by
their absence. Few can doubt that in this contrast
ours is the greater loss. Religion to the rich is a by-
product a luxury or a plaything. Religion to the poor
is an essential ingredient of lives at the best stunted
and confined, oppressed by the perplexities of existence
and limited by the day's toil or the evening's pleasure.

It is not an encouraging picture which is finally
stamped upon the mind in the investigation of human
life in London. It is a vision of vast and shadowy
multitudes of human beings driven by some blind
impulse to the struggle for material comfort and the
needs of a day. Happiness is there, family affection,
the play of children, even ambition and a high moral
standard. But it is the life of a day with a narrowed
outlook. There is light to work by, but no clear radiance
of dawn or sunset. At the end comes nightfall, with
no vision beyond. Vague hope of a better time for the
children seems rarely to develop into a conscious effort
after the attainment of a new social order. Vague

284

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

acknowledgment of a phantom and tenuous life beyond
the grave is the sole representative of that hunger for
immortality which in every age has refused to acquiesce
in the visible ruin of death. Those who have lived with
and learnt to love its labouring peoples, with their in-
domitable cheerfulness, pluck, and endurance, will be
the first to affirm that their predominant need is the
sense of a larger life, without which human existence is
as that of the gnat or the midge ; an uplifting of the
material surroundings to show, if but for a moment, an
encompassing spiritual horizon ; and an ideal cause
able to illuminate even the scene of contemporary
failure with a kind of glory

II

It is interesting to note how, in the discussion of
remedies for the ineffectiveness of religion in modern
England, almost all critics plunge straightway into the
question of machinery. The worship of machinery,
as Matthew Arnold continually asserted, is a national
characteristic of Englishmen. And each observer
appears to hold that if that particular section of the
machine in which he can detect a flaw could be repaired,
or if a particularly up-to-date invention replaced some
antiquated adjustment, the machinery of the Churches
would once again grind out religious enthusiasm. With
one it is the edifice. He deplores the cold, Gothic
building, repellent to the poor. He would substitute
large lighted halls of the remarkable and dignified style
characteristic of the later nineteenth century, with plenty
of carpets, paint, and colour. With another it is the
edifices themselves. Let the leaders of religion come
out into the street, he holds, and the problem is solved.

285

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

With one again it is the service, antiquated, unintelli-
gible to the vulgar. Collect a band, he urges, sing the
" Holy City " and other moving modern melodies, weave
into your prayers allusions to politics and incidents of
the day. With another it is the sermon ; the minister
is too cold, or speaks with stammering tongue. Let us
place a great preacher in every pulpit, and the masses
will vehemently fight for entrance to our churches.
Some advocate, some deprecate, the methods of the
theatre. Some would abolish pews altogether, and let
the men stand. Some see the inevitable advance of
religion if pews are made more comfortable. Each one
has convinced opinions as to what "the poor" will
come to the large hall, the small mission, the street
corner. Few seem to care to face the question what
"the poor" are to be offered when they come.

All this would be very relevant if we could recognise
large populations with real desire after religious devotion
on the one hand, and a Church with a living message
which can satisfy this desire on the other. The whole
problem would then exhibit itself as a consideration of
the method by which the one can be most effectively
brought in contact with the other. But the conditions
are quite otherwise. On the one hand are masses of
people to whom the spiritual world has no meaning,
and from whose lives the fundamental bedrock appeal
of religion seems to have vanished. On the other are
Churches whose faith has grown cold, and whose good
news sounds far removed from anything approaching
the passionate enthusiasm of earlier Christian centuries.
Were this enthusiasm present, the problem of machinery
would soon be solved. Preachers would be speaking
with a conviction itself eloquent. The services would
take upon themselves a character of infectious courage.

286

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

The people would themselves build, as always in the
past, edifices reflecting in the very stones the character-
istics of their faith. Eeligion would impetuously flow
forth from their limited spaces into the open ways.
Until such a wind of the spirit can animate the dry
bones of religious organisation with some such violent
life, all conscious modifications of machinery become
but attempts at creating a soul through the body,
the artificial galvanising from without of an organism
from which the inner life has fled.

Yet, even with such imperfect message as we have, it
is well to criticise the vessels in which it is conveyed ;
more especially if these be but survivals of antique
furniture, or symbols of class distinction and a dead
faith. How far and in what particulars, we may
profitably inquire, is the message of the Churches
hampered by its methods of deliverance?

First in regard to the services. Undoubtedly we are
here suffering from the dead hand of the past. The
morning and evening services of the Church of England,
as normally performed, with their complicated and
mysterious variations of canticles, prayers, and irrele-
vant readings of Scripture, are altogether bewildering
to those not intimately familiar with the books from
which they are compiled. The reformers of the six-
teenth century endeavoured to restore worship to the
people in the vulgar tongue. Unfortunately the Refor-
mation was in essence aristocratic, never, as the
Reformation abroad, awakening response from the
masses of the population. The churches passed from
the hands of the people, who ceased to take a pride in
them. The Church services became more and more
an inheritance of a limited aristocracy. The longing
for something warm, human, inspiring, contributed

287

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

largely to create the independent bodies which in all the
subsequent centuries have formed minor centres of wor-
ship. I have no hesitation in saying that, for the majority
of the poor, to-day's services are as incomprehensible
as if still performed in the Latin tongue. The central
service of the Roman Catholic Church, indeed, with its
dramatic and appealing character, is far more intelligible
even to the humblest worshipper. The Reformation
changes provided the essentials of the Mass in the
English Communion service, a service for dignity and
beauty quite unparalleled. The monkish matins were
never intended for formal parade one day in the week,
swollen by elaborate music into intolerable dimension.
Any one concerned with the religious life of the poor
will welcome most heartily the increased honour paid to
the feast of the Lord's Supper in recent years, and the
progress towards its restoration to the central position
of the Sunday worship. Such a change alone would, I
believe, remove one of the chief obstacles to Church
attendance.

We may welcome also the renewed efforts after light,
colour, and beauty ; the introduction of symbolic action,
procession, and some elements of movement and drama
into the drabness of our churches. Religion is inde-
pendent of such adventitious aids, and the essentials
must never be lost in the attractions of sensuous imagery.
But I am sure that, in the acres of desolate hideousness
of the streets of our working populations, all the appeals
of sense and sound and colour should be associated
with a worship which is to lift the minds of tired men
and women to some other vision than that of their
material meanness. I should like to see the churches
of the wealthy studiously plain ; not vulgar, indeed,
like the " up-to-date " religious edifice, a building which

288

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

will serve as a record and a warning to future ages of
the condition of religion in twentieth-century England ;
but with whitewashed walls and scant decoration, that
the worshippers may contrast this simplicity with the
splendour of their own homes, and acknowledge one
standard of reality in man's judgments, another in
those of God. And I would see the churches of the
poor rich with colour and light with great paintings on
all the walls and the freest use of every artistic appeal
that these also might learn from day to day that the
monotony and meanness of the grey streets in which
they are confined, and the grey lives to which they are
destined, is not a destiny which was designed for them,
nor a bondage from which they will never be freed.

In passing from the ceremonial to the character of
the service, we are confronted with a manifest difficulty.
Living in a transitory time or order, and with a vision
limited to our own settled and decent lives, much of the
language used by men who dwelt amongst the enduring
facts of human existence appears to us archaic and
meaningless. " Agony and bloody sweat " ; " widows
and orphans and all that are desolate and oppressed " ;
"battle, murder, and sudden death"; "the hour of
death and the day of judgment " how faint and far
away all this seems to the rational and settled life of
suburban London ! The difficulty, indeed, will endure
but for a time. The persistence of comfort in a world of
illusion has never existed but for a few generations.
Here, if anywhere, the absence of sympathetic imagina-
tion, and the faithlessness of the Churches to the larger
vision, has produced an aspect of make-believe. If these
congregations could be roused to apprehension of some-
thing of the real world outside of Ireland or South
Africa in the immediate tast, of Macedonia in the imme-

289 U

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

diate present, of the life of the poorest always these
exclamations and cries of appeal would become charged
with an awful significance, a demand urged with violence
in the name of fear and pity for the vindication of the
government of a righteous God.

And as with the service, so with the sermon. I
would not reiterate the demand for "good preaching,"
which seems to me utterly to confuse the purposes of
the services of the Church. We meet, not for edification,
but for worship to confess our sins, to obtain spiritual
succour, to renew the visible guarantee of fellowship.
Eloquence will attract everywhere, in the pulpit as in
the market-place. But the crowds which run after a
popular preacher, which purchase his portraits and
finger his clothes and pry into his family life and the
contents of his larder, seem to me somehow alien from
the sincerest forms of religion. Yet there is no doubt
that the patient layman has a right to appeal for better
preaching. The pulpit in many cases is not only not an
attractive, but is actually a repellent, force. We have
no privilege to insist upon eloquence. But we can
demand sincerity, the frank facing of difficulty, freedom
from the conventional machinery of the popular exposi-
tion of doctrine. The prevailing theology, even more
perhaps than the prevailing liturgy, is wrapped up in
an ancient language. The very terms are technical
grace, justification, conversion, perseverance. They
flow out glibly from the student who has soaked himself
in their historical meanings ; they are Greek to the
general. They were once living realities for which men
fought gladly and died. They still symbolise realities,
the permanent elements of the life-history of the soul.
But they are wrapped around in cobwebs and the com-
plications of a technical system, frozen into sterility.

290

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

They have no more meaning and no more appeal to the
audience at whom they are thrown in such profusion
than the details of the performance of the Mosaic ritual,
or the genealogies of the legendary heroes of the
Hebrew Bible. We want neither edifying lessons
drawn from the wanderings of Israel or the Book of
Joshua; nor brilliant "word-painting" of some of the
scenes of the Bible with a more up-to-date eloquence ;
nor the exposition of the machinery of schemes of salva-
tion once real from which the life has departed; but
some message concerning the things of the spirit,
delivered in simplicity and humility and sincerity to
men who would fain be simple and humble and sincere.

A special question has been aroused by the impeach-
ment, with significant emphasis, of the methods of
modern charity and its alliance with religion. Mr.
Booth discovers over the whole town a persistent and
undignified struggle between competing religious bodies;
and in any particular choice slum area a competition,
rising into an almost open warfare, for possession of the
field. One half of London seems engaged in entertain-
ing the other half with soup and bread with a view to
its subsequent spiritual edification. Bound the city he
finds the whole population visibly tainted by the corrupt
influence of competitive charity : " ' Irreligion,' said
one incumbent, ' is the result of all this bribery ; we are
all in it, church and chapel are equally bad. It begins
with the children ; buns to come to Sunday School, and
so on, so that they grow up with the idea that the
Church is simply a milch cow for tracts and charity.' "

The typical East End, the happy hunting-ground of
the slummer, is "overdone with religion and relief."
In St. Luke's on Sunday afternoon "visitors from fiva
different agencies in the buildings are found bribing the

291

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

people to come to their meetings." In Soho, " nowhere
is the clash of rival doctors so great as here." But
even the far-off regions at the limits of the city tell a
similar tale. In Deptford " the poor parts are indeed a
regular Tom Tiddler's ground for missions, and we hear
of one woman, busy at the wash-tuh, calling out, ' You
are the fifth this morning.' ' In Greenwich there is
" too much competition for the moral health of the
people." In Woolwich the inhabitants are "fought
over by the various religious bodies with more than
common vivacity." Even in the new districts, whose
development almost immediately into slum areas is one
of the most appalling revelations of Mr. Booth's book,
the same astonishing competition is shown. Down in
Wandsworth "religious activity takes the shape very
largely of missionary efforts, competing with each other,
not without mutual recrimination." In Kilburn " there
are four churches after every poor family," and the
observer wonders at the strange struggle " fought over
men's bodies for their souls."

These competitive charities become most pernicious
when they are definitely used to wean adherents from
a rival faith. It is a somewhat dismal commentary
on the nature of the forces behind the distribution
of modern charities to find that while a particular
mission in a neglected district fails to evoke support,
a mission planted down to combat the influence of some
rival Christian body never seems to lack money or
adherents. This is especially true of the opposition to
the new Ritualistic energies which in the past twenty
years have swept into all the poorer quarters of London.
" The record of the Evangelical mission," says Mr.
Booth of one district, and a similar commentary is
repeated all through the volumes, "is simply that of a

292

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

struggle with the High Church for the souls and bodies
of the children. It is dole versus dole and treat versus
treat, and the contest openly admitted on both sides,
while people taking the gifts with either hand explain
how careful they must be when attending service that
the other side knows nothing about it." " This atrocious
system," as Mr. Booth rightly calls it, is a very dis-
tressing revelation of the superior power of religious
rivalry to religious charity.

This enormous stream of charity flows down through
the various religious agencies from the rich to the poor.
We hear of mission funds with incomes of ten or twenty
thousand a year ; some business-like, some not audited at
all, or " audited in heaven." Twenty-five thousand chil-
dren are fed in one winter by one mission ; over a million
men receive shelter, cocoa, and bread from another ; in
a third to all comers is a free night-refuge. Yet the
problem of poverty is no nearer solution. Nor do the
attempts to bring men within the reach of the Gospel
by means of the offer of food and gifts appear to create
permanent results. That the whole system does more
harm than good is the verdict of those familiar with its
results. One would think it was almost time for a
definite and united appeal to the members of the different
churches and the charitable rich seriously to consider
the harm which is being done by the cruelty of their
kindness.

Other questions of machinery of the lesser importance
are of interest. There is the failure of the Sunday
Schools either to implant intelligible religious ideas or
to foster a desire for spiritual communion and worship.
There is the (as I think) deplorable theory that some
special kind of popular "hall" is necessary for the
development of the religion of " the poor " ; that by

293

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

massing these into huge aggregations you may encou-
rage their reviving energies, save the expense of too
lavish "plant," and use your single successful evan-
gelist to the best advantage. But the essence of the
problem resides in the spirit which lies behind the
machinery and its influence on the religious life of
London.

On the side of the working peoples this is certainly a
period of unusual difficulty. The uprooting from the
country and the transference to the town has caused a
general confusion and disorder. Man has not yet
clearly apprehended his position or appreciated its
possibility. He has been " dumped " down in some
casual street, unknown to his neighbours, unconnected
with a corporate body or fellowship. He moves through
time in a kind of confused twilight, dimly wondering
what it all means. Material comfort and security is
inevitably under these conditions his main interest.
The memories of a life which is independent of the hard,
visible boundaries become daily dimmer, as he clangs
the hammer, or heaves merchandise, or manipulates
continually hard, material things. I think we may
safely affirm that this creation of a city race is in no
small degree responsible for the present manifest failure
of appeal of all spiritual creeds.

But the failure is none the less considerable from the
side of the Churches. We come from outside with our
gospel, aliens, with alien ideas. The Anglican Church
represents the ideas of the upper classes, of the univer-
sities, of a vigorous life in which bodily strength, an
appearance of knowledge, a sense of humour, occupy
prominent places. The large Nonconformist bodies
represent the ideals of the middle classes, the strenuous
self-help and energy which have stamped their ideas

294

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

upon the whole of Imperial Britain. Each lives in
poor districts, in them, not of them. Each totally fails
to apprehend a vision of life as reared in a mean street,
and now confronting existence on a hazardous weekly
wage from a hlock-dwelling or the half of a two-storied
cottage. Our movements and inexplicable energies are
received with a mixture of toleration and perplexity.
We are recognised as meaning well, but our aims and
ideals never become clearly intelligible. " What is he
after?" "What does he get?" "What is behind it
all ? " are questions I have heard frequently asked as
some church has bourgeoned out into fresh and ingenious
enterprise. Sometimes we are interpreted as pursuing
some deep game of party politics ; sometimes as a kind
of unofficial policemen paid by the rates and taxes:
more often perhaps as possessed of a kind of exuberant
energy which must somehow find relief in religious
services and mothers' meetings. Funds from outside
raise churches and chapels ; funds from outside provide
clubs and material relief. We appear and we vanish.
After a few months of this perplexing enthusiasm the
curate or minister is called to another sphere of work,
and disappears from the universe of those who had just,
perhaps, commenced to realise that he possesses some
traits of ordinary humanity. If we could only appre-
hend how entirely baffling and irrational all this must
appear to those who are looking out of, instead of into,
the abyss, our surprise, I think, would be less at the
vastness of our failure than at the magnitude even of
our poor success.

Connected with this divergence we must recognise
how scantily up to the present the Churches and mis-
sions have identified themselves with those demands of
Labour, the deliberate attempts to strike at the roots

295

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

of the ills and oppressions of the time, which the
working man knows to be just. The battles of the
past for social amelioration have been fought apart
from, and often with the open opposition of, the larger
religious organisations. "All the Churches are against
me," Lord Shaftesbury notes in the course of his
campaign for the redemption of the child-life of
England. And the bitterest opposition to such social
reformers as Charles Kingsley came from the official
Christian communities. Are we better to-day than our
fathers? Factory law, the right of combination, free
trade, sanitary dwellings, a humane poor law these
were slowly and painfully accomplished without the
assistance of the Churches. The needs are as insistent
to-day. Decent housing and a home, shorter hours of
labour, a living wage, opportunities of life, the develop-
ment of common interests in the municipal community
where in such questions of fundamental justice as these
are the united voices of the Christian community
demanding the recognition of a universal responsibility
in the name of the common fellowship ? Undoubtedly
it is because a certain section of the High Church party
have fearlessly proclaimed this social gospel of a visible
kingdom of God that they have earned, to a degree so
perplexing to many who deplore their doctrines, the
respect and friendship of the leaders of labour and the
devotion of the poor. These clergymen have no mono-
poly of devoted work, nor do they give in charity more
than the missions which endeavour to stem their in-
fluence. The working man has no affection for
elaborate ritual. He accepts with resignation, as part
of an inexplicable activity, the ornaments, the proces-
sions, and the ceremony. If they processioned round
their churches standing on their heads, he would con-

296

front the performance with the same toleration. But
they have gone down and lived amongst the people ;
they have proclaimed an intelligible gospel of Christian
Socialism ; demanding not " charity," but "justice."
The campaign has brought upon them a storm of
obloquy from the world of orthodox religion. It has
earned them the affection of the poor. Such a life as
that of Father Mackonoche, or Father Lowder, or, in
recent times, Father Dolling, with his continual appeal
for "a chance" for "my people," has struck the
popular imagination and evoked a pathetic gratitude.
I am aware that this social message is not the whole
gospel, not perhaps the most important part of the
Christian message. But it is far the hardest part to
get uttered, and it is the message which the times
imperatively demand. The cry for justice provokes a
bitter indignation in quarters where the plea for charity
evokes a ready response. It is not unnatural that many
successful enterprises doing much good work should
hesitate to alienate their supporters and subscribers
with the revolutionary teachings of the New Testament.
But I am entirely convinced that no message which does
not contain as an integral and essential part of its pro-
clamation this effort towards a visible social salvation
will fall upon any but deaf ears amongst the working
populations of our great cities.

Professing Christians, it has been a little cynically
asserted, are the chief obstacles to the spread of
Christianity in England. Those outside the Church
are continually confronting the charters of our creed
and the weekly profession of our intentions with the
dull and uninspired acquiescence of our daily lives.
Small wonder that they conclude on the whole that
they cannot understand what we are after, and that

297

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

what they can understand they don't admire. They see
us as eager and tenacious of social and monetary success
as those who make no profession of unworldliness. They
note our great charities, but they note an equal if not
greater charity in the unbeliever ; in such a class as,
for example, the players of a theatre, which many
profess to despise. In many quarters the advice has
been traditional amongst the workmen to avoid a
"Christian" employer. They discern us kindling into
occasional spasmodic violence, not at social wrong or
the enormous suffering of the world, but when we are
accusing some particular Church of attempting to over-
reach the others in the distribution of public funds.
They find us noisily advertising our own wares and
proclaiming the shoddiness of our neighbours ; devoting
at least as much energy to the undermining of their
efforts as to the establishment of our own. They note
large numbers of actively professing Christians who
manifest no obvious fruits of the spirit; who are
querulous or exacting masters or mistresses, whose
lives pass in a cold routine of self-centred business ;
alien altogether from that eager and passionate enthu-
siasm of humanity to which St. Paul affixed the great
name of charity. The verdict may be superficial it
neglects, and unfairly neglects, the other side of the
picture ; but that it is a verdict endorsed explicitly and
implicitly by a vast proportion of the population of
London, I have no doubt whatever.

Eeligion has rejoiced in the clear knowledge of God
and forgotten the fellowship of man. And the punish-
ment has been, not the overthrow of its outward
prosperity, but the slow withdrawal of that revelation
of which it seemed to possess so secure a certainty.
So that now we walk for the most part blindly, in the

298

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

twilight, with no clear vision of a spiritual world and
an unseen Father. It may be that the way hack to the
unclouded height will be found through the humble and
deliberate search after that fellowship which has been
offended and denied. Confronted with records of the
religion of t London in this time of tranquillity, I
can imagine no more sensational discovery than
the first message of the Christian teaching and its
judgment of the life of the day. Teaching so familiar
as to become meaningless may assume a new signifi-
cance. The feast to which first are to be called the
friendless and poor ; the " Inasmuch " with its triumph
and its mysterious warning ; the strange and solitary
revelation of future judgment for a rich man who lived
happily with want and misery lying unnoticed at his
doors ; the woes pronounced on the complacent orthodox
religions, so entirely convinced that they are fulfilling
every jot and tittle of the law ; these have a meaning
for Christianity in England at the dawn of the twentieth
century. Assuredly it is as well that the old gospel
should be given a trial before we proclaim the necessity
for a new.

Men need never despair of the future of religion.
Humanity, as a great philosopher affirmed, is not des-
tined permanently to inhabit ruins. A world which is
forgetting God does not involve a God who is forgetting
the world. The movement of new spiritual advance
may arise from without, not from within the Church ; as
so many of the great restorative movements of the past
generation, whose divine origin and guidance were un-
recognised by the members of the organised Christian
community. We may be very confident that the time
of frost and present cold will break up before the
warmth of another spring. The Church by neglect of

299

THE RELIGION OF THE CITY

its election and high calling may prolong the misery and
increase the confusion of time. But no human wilfulness
or weakness can for ever delay the restitution of all
things and the triumph of the end. A new dawn will
one day illuminate the vastness and desolation of the
city. Each solitary life of its millions, perishing, as
it seems, unheeded and alone, is destined at last to
find the purpose of its being in union with the Infinite,
alike its origin and its goal.

300

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

' The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks :
The long day wanes : the slow moon climbs : the deep
Moans round with many voices. 1 '

TENNYSON.

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

A WRITER, once complained of Charles Kingsley,
that he wrote as if always anticipating the
happening of something tremendous ahout the middle
of next week. The quotation is a judgment, less of
the excitement of the author than of the insensibility
of the critic. For, throughout the age in which
Kingsley lived, something tremendous always did
happen in the middle of next week. The spectator,
astonished or indifferent, confronted one of the greatest
of all historical upheavals of the foundations of the
mind of man. The Victorian Age, which now, alike
in its sobriety and its sanguine dreams, stands so
remote in the background of the memory of those who
are living in an alien time, will be stamped in the
record of the future as an age of hurrying change. In
many respects that change has resulted in a profounder
transformation than had been effected by all the pre-
ceding centuries. The gulf is greater between the
England of to-day and the England which, in its
secure and tranquil life, accepted without emotion the
death of the last of the Georgian Kings, than between
that England and the spacious days of Elizabeth, or
the coming of Augustine with a new faith from over the
sea. Eighty years ago England was a quiet community,
chiefly agriculturist, scattered over a little island. The

303

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

traveller journeyed to Edinburgh or to Rome by the
same methods of progress as those which had served
the messengers of the Conqueror. The peasant flung
his seed into the soil, and hoped for the direction of the
forces of Nature, the rain and kindly sun, towards the
attainment of the harvest, as at any day through all
the centuries. The generations of the common people
gathered for petition or praise, accepting the unchal-
lenged announcement that the visible ruin of death was
but a prelude to an awful judgment ; when all the actual
deeds done in the flesh would be brought to account ;
and the books set and the seals broken and the verdict
proclaimed, which should decide the fate of the poor,
pitiful human soul throughout unending time.

The age which has just gone by, with all its
meannesses and heroisms, its periods of great passion
and intervening tranquillities, has exhibited the
passing of this earlier England. And now, those
who anywhere attempt to penetrate beneath the
surface, with all its humour and glitter and material
opulence, realise that they are estimating forces and
equilibriums in a new nation. In the earlier period
such changes as were accomplished were visible and
open ; there were manifest tremors and violence in the
world of politics and religion, controversies through the
fabric of organic society. So Chartist Agitations,
Oxford Movements, Anti-Corn Law Leagues, Liberal
Aggressions, Evolution and " the New Reformation,"
with the noise of the fall of privilege and the songs
of triumph of the victors, proclaimed to all men that
great events were toward. But in the later time these
portents of change had passed away. Men's minds
turned towards other horizons : expansion "beyond the
sky-line " and the harvesting of their rich fortune of

304

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

prosperity. And the sound of the great storms of the
nineteenth century died slowly into silence, as the
rough seas subsided into the mere ground-swell of past
disturbance, and this again to the quiet ripple of the
waves along the shore. Content with the present,
convinced that enough had been done, a little wearied
with the tempests of reform, England settled down to
sleep.

Yet to the sensitive eye this vanishing of visible up-
heaval has in no way checked or changed the processes
of development and decay. The thirty years of reaction
will appear to the future as fruitful in the seeds of
transition as the previous thirty years of progress. For
events in the world of thought and opinion the only
world which ultimately matters, which will inevitably
now, or in the coming time, mould the world of material
things in accordance with its claims do not cease to
march forward because men have become weary of the
effort of adjustment. Throughout this passing time
of order forces of creation and destruction have been
playing upon the plastic material of the minds of men.
Outwardly, things appear settled and unchanged. The
ancient institutions of the realm, the Constitution, the
feudal system, the Protestant faith, the Established
Church, stand, it would seem, even more secure than in
that restless past when the utility of all old things was
being roughly called in question. Yet men need to
remember need again and again to remember that a
nation, no more than an individual, can bid time stand
still, and proclaim the permanence of the summer days.
There is an irony of judgment in the spectacle of all
those past brief periods of peace, in which a people, on
the verge of some vast disquietude, riddled with forces
which are hastening the upheavals of the abyss, stands

305 X

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

proud and satisfied, confident that at length it has
attained the certainties of an afternoon, golden and
unending. To-day, were we but as sensitive to dis-
turbance in the world of man's profound convictions,
as to the outward modifications of the forms of society
in which those convictions are clothed, our ears might
well he deafened by the noise of the crash of the
elements, of growing and of dying worlds.

And, whether delayed by idleness or man's natural
fears of the violence of an unknown future, and so
postponed again and yet again by those whose first
demand is peace at least in their time ; sooner or later,
without any doubt at all, the outward fabric must
respond to the realities of the inner life. Kuins must
collapse and be cleared away, and new dwelling places
be constructed adequate to man's desires. To the
eye which can scan the larger stretches of time,
and see the end in the beginning, the process
has been already completed before a stone has been
disturbed. The French Revolution was accomplished
when society laughed with Voltaire, instead of lament-
ing, over the Church's immoralities ; and applauded
Rousseau's proclamation, with lean, upraised claw, of
the coming of an age of innocence and gold. And all
the intervening time of troublous dreams, of financiers
oppressed with a national bankruptcy, and bishops
timidly essaying a reform of manners, and the coming of
a new king and an age of enlightenment amid a universal
rejoicing, were but the passing scenes in a drama whose
fifth act had been already composed. A similar insight
can be applied to the things of to-day. The passing of
the first peasant, unchallenged, into the labyrinth of
the city, his discovery there of independence and an
adequate return for his labour, was the passing of the

306

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

feudal system in England. The company which
witnessed the admission of the first Dissenter into
Parliament witnessed also, all unwittingly, the fall of
the Established Church. And the perplexities of the
author of " Colenso's Arithmetic " over the reconciliation
of irreconcilable numbers in the estimates of the wander-
ings and the fightings of the children of Israel, marked
the close of a particular type of Protestant civilisation
which had been dominant in England for three
centuries.

Here are three institutions built out of living forces
into forms and systems congruous with a former
energetic life, which now stand, to the impartial eye,
undermined in their foundations. Each had been
fiercely assailed during the time immediately passed ; and
each, while the springs of an inner life remained, stood
secure against all the forces of reason and of hatred
which fell upon them. In the mid-century, the fury of
the middle classes and of manufacturing England threw
itself against the old Landed System. Cobden, after
the freeing of trade, was already joyfully proclaiming
" the crash of feudalism " as the completion of his
policy. The landed interests were tense with the
consciousness of the coming of change, and banding
themselves together for a final, desperate, and, as most
would have confessed, hopeless resistance. Yet the
fifty years have passed, and, with their passing, all the
noise of conflict. The system remains, and in practice
almost unchallenged. Little more than thirty years
ago, the visible end of the Established Church appeared
but a matter of days, The destruction in Ireland had
seemed but a prelude to a greater destruction this
side of the sea. In the records and memoirs of the
'seventies, while the forces of the Liberation Society

307

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

and other assailants breathe the consciousness of
victory, the records of the Church's leaders are full
of mournful forebodings of an imminent and inevit-
able destruction. Yet the kaleidoscope has changed ;
and the noise and forecast of coming success have died
into silence. And to-day the Liberation Society has
become a negligeable force in politics, and all questions
of reform or disestablishment of the national religion
relegated to purely academic discussion. Little more
than a generation back, again, the popular faith seemed
tottering upon the verge of ruin. The adherents of the
" New Reformation " were openly anticipating a renewal
of the large upheavals of the sixteenth century. The
astounding advance of the sciences, the examination by
the new critical methods of the ancient Biblical nar-
ratives, the spread of education and a more humane
culture would leave, it was held, the popular religion as
a mere survival of absurd and forgotten things. Yet
the days have gone, and the visible change has not
hastened. Protestantism stands entrenched and secure ;
its temples increasing in number and in splendour ; its
adherents, it would seem, confident in themselves and
in the triumph of their cause. It is the survivors of
the crusaders of these earlier days who now, in some
sadness, contemplate the walls they had set themselves
to destroy, still high and inviolate ; and who now
wonder why all the efforts of their forces and of Time
have thus forlornly failed.

So these questions have drifted out of the region of
living politics. The reformer who enters upon his
career with arguments concerning land reform or
religious equality is likely to be roughly reminded
that some time has elapsed since the death of Disraeli,
or that he is not living in the days of the Prince

308

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

Consort. The word " Disestablishment " would produce,
in the mind of the present-day statesman, the same
bewildering effect as the word " delicacy " upon Matthew
Arnold's friend. For the first time, those committed
to the maintenance of the older order are prepared to
relax their efforts, as they assure themselves that at
length the danger is passed, and, for many generations,
the victory assured.

Yet, while the outward signs of struggle have thus
died away, hidden and unseen forces have been effecting
a more fatal destruction. To-day, indeed, the end is
far more clearly assured than in all the time of the
conflict. While the leaves were green and the sap
flowed freely in the branches, the tempest beat down
in vain. The tree stands now in the security of a
quiet air. But, if the vital forces are withdrawn, and
within the wood has turned to a little dust, all the
fair outward seeming may hold a delusive danger: a
breath of summer wind may ensure a ruin which could
not be accomplished before its time by all the storms
of winter.

And such appears, to some at least, to be the con-
dition to-day of ancient systems, whose stability at the
present receives scarcely a passing challenge.

The first, and perhaps the most far-reaching of these,
is the English Landed System : the feudal organisation,
with all its implications of leadership and obedience, as
embedded in the very heart of the old life of England.
Here is one place in which the thirty years of silence
have effected more momentous changes than all the
hubbub of the former time. Kents were high in the
early 'seventies, land increasingly valuable. The
landed interest had attained supremacy in Parliament
for the first time in a generation. The great uprising

309

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

of the agricultural labourer had heen successfully over-
come ; and, with the breaking of the Union, the farmers
were rejoicing at the battening down of the hatches
upon the revolting slaves. The old tripartite division
of landlord, farmer, and landless labourer might have
appeared as something in the nature of a Providential
order, convenient to the genius and conditions of the
English race.

A statesman has well said, that if the great changes
which have fallen on the English landed interest during
the last few decades had been essayed by legislation and
human demands, instead of by blind and impersonal
forces, they could only have been accomplished through
revolution and civil war. An immense fall in prices
has resulted in a widespread destruction. Rents and
farmers' profits have alike diminished, in places below
any possible continuance of the old system. The per-
sistence of feudalism under these circumstances could
only have been affected by two stringent provisions : the
one, the closing of the ports of England to foreign food ;
the other, the barricading of the entrances of all the
cities to the agricultural labourer. With organisation
destroyed and all hope of improvement abandoned, the
labourer has quietly taken revenge on his masters.
With hatches battened down, the slave has crawled out
of the window. So that now an exodus of all the young
and able-bodied, all who possess energy and hope and
confidence in themselves, pours an ever-increasing flood
from the deserted fields into the streets of the towns.
Imagination has been struck by the dolorous case of
Ireland, a population, it would appear, vanishing from
its own land. Isolate rural England, and exactly the
same problem is revealed. It is the cities alone which
retain the influx, and keep the people of England, a

310

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

landless people, still within the borders of their own
land. Wages rise steadily to attract the forlorn
remnant, land passes from arahle to pasture, from
pasture to scanty sheep runs, or developes special
cultivations, dependent upon nomadic labour lured
outwards for a moment from the slums of the cities.
But still the famine of men deepens ; and from east to
west the cry goes up, that what is left is scarce worth
retaining, that the departure of the present generation
will witness the end of an age.

Here is the change at the silent basis, that assiduous
and docile stratum of serf labour upon which the whole
complex structure was reared. A change no- less pro-
found has been effected, meanwhile, around the summit.
The structure is being replaced, piece by piece, by other
material ; until, at the end, without visible collapse, the
whole thing has become transformed. The old country
gentleman, the type of the lesser landed aristocracy of
England, is already becoming a thing of the past. On
the one hand has come the blow of the fall in land
values. On the other, an increasing comfort and
extravagance of society has stimulated a more rapid
squandering of fortune. He is vanishing from Parlia-
ment. His voice is no longer potent in the councils of
his party. His place is being taken by the men of the
new wealth rich brewers, financiers, a Rutherfoord
Harris or a Harry Marks. He is vanishing also from
the land of his inheritance. One day his house and
lands are sold to one of the new rich, desirous of
establishing a position and founding a family ; and he
has passed from the horizon of those who regretfully, or
with bitter memories, are compelled to own allegiance
to another master. The larger estates, indeed, still
remain for the most part secure. The American

311

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

marriages, the gold-fields of South Africa, the harvest
of the increasing ground rents of the cities, have here
prevented the crumbling of the whole concern into
ruin. But although some kind of material prosperity
is thus secured, and round the great houses a race of
dependants can still be reared, and the occupations
of game-preserving or gardening or the repairing of
motors replace the direct cultivation of the soil, yet the
spirit of the old cannot be transformed to the exotic life
of the new. The country house, instead of being a
centre of local interest, is now an appendage of the
capital. A tiny piece of London is transferred in the
late summer and autumn to a more salubrious air and
the adjacency of the coverts. Rural England appears
as slowly passing into gardens and shooting grounds,
with intervening tracts of sparse grass-lands, committed
to the rearing of cattle and of pheasants, rather than of
men. Fifty years ago, one class of reformer could still,
without absurdity, find the solution of social discontent
in a revived feudalism. A Carlyle or a Ruskin would
passionately plead with the gentlemen of England to
take up the burden of government committed to a
landed aristocracy. What observer of the England of
to-day would have the hardihood to proclaim a similar
message ? Frenzied efforts of sectional influences
attempt to deal with the special hurt that grips them.
The farmer demands Protection and such impossible
follies. The landlord seeks grants-in-aid in relief of the
rates. The country clergyman laments the vanishing
of nearly half his income in a generation. The friends
of the labourer desire more and better cottages, or a
modified educational system, or the music-hall entertain-
ment, as alone able to keep him contented in his
position. They are one and all blind to the fact that

312

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

they are confronting, not a series of special discontents,
but a whole dying order. Changes, which they can
neither comprehend nor control, are creating an Eng-
land alien from the England which they have ever
known.

The change could be accepted with tolerance, and
even with some humour, but for the fact that the ruins
and the playgrounds cumber the ground, and forbid the
creation of the new order. The new millionaires might
play at patronage, the model village be spread out for
the delight of the town visitor, the farms and fields
crumble into picturesque decay, were it not that the
elimination of any free and healthy country-bred life
means the loss of elements of stability and human well-
being vital to the future of the race. The land available
is limited : and the effort demanded for the creation
either of a scientific agriculture on a large scale, or of a
race of free yeomen or peasant farmers, finding economic
security in co-operation, supplementing the work of the
fields with home industries, is effectually damped by the
opposition, on the one hand, of those who know not that
their day is over, on the other of those entirely convinced
that their day has come. So that there is no active
effort to establish a system which everywhere abroad,
from Brittany to Bulgaria, is alone proving adequate to
the exigencies of the newer time. To the patriot the
spectacle is one of desolation. He knows the necessity
of a continual stream of vigorous life to replenish the
furnace of the cities. He recognises that that stream is
likely to vanish through the drainage of its sources of
supply. He is convinced also that the restoration of the
people to their land, in which at the present they move
as aliens, is one of the insistent needs of social advance.
He can examine in diverse districts of England, in

313

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

Dorset, and Hants, and Lincoln, and Worcester, solitary
experiments which have shown conspicuous success.
Yet he finds no interest in his schemes, no response to
his appeal. He is beating the thin air in vain. lie-
formers like Mr. Eider Haggard are compelled to
confess that the whole subject is regarded as caviare
to the general, that the man who would determine to
thrust it forward runs the risk of being branded as
a bore.

Such of the land. What of the Church during the
same tranquil time ? With the active onslaught upon
the Establishment dying away, there have here been
changes equally noteworthy, equally suggestive of some
future explosive action. Briefly, it may be said that
these changes have developed two deep-flowing and
diverse currents. While the clergy, as a whole, and
the more militant laity, have been drifting towards a
Catholic position, the great bulk of the laity, faithful
and unfaithful, have remained Protestant or indifferent.
This statement does not, indeed, imply an endorsement
of the follies of those who see a vast " Romanising "
conspiracy amongst the bishops and clergy, or who
contemplate with wrathful impotence the announcement
of a dogma, or the elaboration of a ritual, which they
hold to be puerile, dangerous, or foreign. Extremists
must always accompany any large movement of spiritual
assertion, and always scandalise those who demand, first
of all, sobriety and adherence to the orthodox ways. It
is not a "Romanising" but a "Catholic" revival, which
the student of religions will emphasise. The attempt is
deliberate to emphasise the Catholic elements in the
compromise of the sixteenth century, and all those par-
ticular conceptions of religious life which gather round

314

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

the real existence of a visible Church. On the one side,
now, are the Catholic assertions. The Church is seen
as a definite organism with a divinely constituted
ministry. The Sacraments appear as channels of a
supernatural life. Symbolism is welcomed as the ex-
pression of a deliberate ritual of worship. There is
insistence upon a disciplined life ; with the observance
of seasons and times ; the setting forth of an austerity,
a feiTour of devotion, a humility, courses of self-examina-
tion, as the way towards the perfect life. On the other,
is the opinion of the vast bulk of present public opinion ;
to which the Church and its ministers are matters of
very human construction, of no particular authority or
veneration ; and the Sacraments at most pleasant
memorial ceremonies ; and ritual is absurd ; and
times of abstinence or special devotion entirely re-
pugnant ; and the highest aim of religion the setting
forth of a sober and not too exaggerated piety, sweeten-
ing the struggle of the life of the day. Here is an
antinomy which no legislation can reconcile. The hope,
still stoutly maintained by a few forlorn fighters, that it
will be possible by special legislation, Church Discipline
Bills and the like, either to purge the Church of England
of all its Catholic elements, or to reduce these by threats
and persecutions to a decent Protestantism, shows a
pathetic ignorance of the actual possibilities of the
future. Could some such shattering decision be obtained
by law, or embodied in legislation, as that which has
recently stripped half its endowments from the United
Free Church of Scotland, and the Catholic position be
declared untenable within the Establishment, without
any doubt at all those thus dispossessed would go forth
contentedly into the wilderness ; and the remnant would
find itself in a position somewhat parallel to the " Wee

315

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

Kirk," with large endowments and no ministers to enjoy
them. No one can study the position of the movement
which its opponents delight to call " the Catholic re-
action," without being conscious of the existence of a
vigorous life. Its congregations are large and enthu-
siastic. Its churches, many recently built in slum or
suburb, are erected and maintained largely by present-
day contributions. Most of the vital force of religion, as
at present manifest in the Church of England, the effort
towards social regeneration, the militant combat against
unbelief, has enrolled under its banners. Few sights
are at once more ludicrous and more pathetic, than the
efforts of the faithful ladies and laymen to stem the tide.
The appeals in bulky correspondence in the Times, the
description of enormities seen in some village church,
the money so freely expended upon "Protestant"
defence, the rich livings awaiting the skilled advocate
of the orthodox belief, all fail ; because lacking in that
one element of spiritual ardour and enthusiasm and con-
fidence in its cause, which neither indignation can
kindle nor money buy.

Beyond this fundamental and dangerous divergence,
time has brought other changes. The old position of
the Church as an accepted element of a social order, the
traditional attitude of the clergyman in the fabric of the
country life, is passing with that order's decline. The
clergy have lost heavily by the fall of the tithe and of
land values ; and their poverty now presents a separate
and importunate problem. The layman offers a steady
and successful resistance to any suggestion that he shall
take upon himself the burden of their support. The
supply of clergy actually decreases, despite the enormous
increase of population. Attendance at the Church's
worship seems likewise to exhibit a steady decline.

316

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

Thought has driven far beyond the boundaries of the
old formularies and historic creeds. To the men of the
twentieth century the assertions and warnings of the
mediaeval age sound strangely remote and incongruous.
At the same time, the actual present relationship of
the Church to the legislature of the nation is becoming
more and more conspicuously impossible. It is tied
with the bonds of a vanished past, unable either to
reform itself or to obtain relief through legislation. In
each specific instance, a Parliament, composed of men
of all religions and of none, gravely or frivolously dis-
cusses the expediency of action, in debates which are at
once unedifying and ridiculous. Those who have de-
liberately repudiated any connection or membership are
the first to advocate the modifications of its theology or
the tuning of its pulpits. The deadlock has extended
even into the manipulations of its machinery. A tiny
Bill for the authorisation of two new Bishoprics, for
which the funds had been privately subscribed, was
lengthily discussed, bitterly opposed, and only carried,
after years of delay, by the definite determination of the
Government to push it through at any cost. Nor is it
possible to see how, without the fortunate accident of a
Prime Minister unusually concerned with the Church's
welfare, it would be possible for such a Bill to be ever
carried again. No future Ministry, it will be safe to
say, whether Protectionist or Eadical, will be much
concerned in occupying time or arousing resistance with
minor measures of Church organisation. Beyond is the
universal chaos of opinion amongst those who can at
once appeal to, and refuse to be bound by, formularies
stereotyped into uniformity three centuries ago. Each
particular reformer sets forth his gospel, and challenges
his opponents either themselves to fall back upon the

317

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

position from which he has diverged, or to bring his
orthodoxy to the test and judgment of the paralysed
secular arm.

The situation has hecome, in these latter years,
manifestly impossible. A movement has arisen within
the boundaries of the Church, and obtained allegiance
from all parties, towards the forwarding of an internal
reform. But, in its actual progress, the movement
seems drifting farther and farther away from an appre-
hension of the hard realities of the situation. The effort
has been directed, and rightly, towards the formation of
some kind of National Council, a union of reformed
Convocations, or some specially constituted Synod, to
which may be committed the maintenance of discipline
and adjustment of formularies, and ultimately the control
of material endowment. But the distrust of the various
parties of the Church, each for the other, is so profound,
that the preliminary difficulty has not yet been solved of
the constitution of such a Council, and the qualification
of the body which its members shall be authorised to
represent. The States-General once called together, it
is feared, movement must of necessity originate : from
Council to National Assembly, from Assembly to Con-
vention, and an ecclesiastical Reign of Terror. The
one party, therefore, more and more distrustful of the
religion of the average complacent citizen, has demanded
sometimes that the franchise shall be limited to those
confirmed, who have the right to communicate; more fre-
quently, perhaps, to those who actually communicate with
some assiduity. The faith which believes that the State
will ever again incorporate in statutory definition a body
whose qualifications shall be that each " shall communi-
cate at the least three times in the year, of which Easter
to be one," is only surpassed in its naive simplicity by

318

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

the faith that, to a body so constituted, will be handed
over the goodwill and fabrics and endowments of the
National Church of England. On the other side are
those who desire for the suffrage merely the qualification
of a ratepayer, accompanied by a refusal to " contract
out," and deliberately to repudiate membership. Inheri-
tors, though unknowingly, of the traditions of Hooker
and of Arnold, these discern the Church as a reflection
in another aspect, a more humane and spiritual aspect,
of the activities of the State, the whole constituted
people. They are prepared, in conformity with such an
ideal, to carry through large modifications. They would
subdue the defiant doctrines to the requirements of
modern thought. They would modify the moral law of
the Church such as the law concerning divorce and
marriage into harmony with the slow moving changes
of the main stream of the national morality. They
would strive to include certainly all Christian, perhaps
all theistic or ethical, bodies in this national body.
They are impatient of subtle theological divisions which
separate sect from sect, and set them thundering each
against the other. They desire to work towards an
" undenominational " religion of a cheerful and not
too exacting character, which shall emphasise the
more distinctively British virtues, provide the emotional
satisfaction of a simple spiritual worship, conduct the
work of charity, and maintain missions and the standard
of morality and right reverence for the accepted order,
amongst the working classes and the poor.

The one party emphasises the adjective " National" ;
the other the substantive " Church." The obstacle to
the one change is the passive resistance of the laity ;
to the other, the active resistance of the clergy. Yet
it seems difficult to see how movement can be long

319

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

delayed, and how movement can proceed upon any
except upon one of these two lines. Upon which of
these the choice ultimately falls, depends the character
of [that Church's future. The paths steadily diverge
from the present point of junction. If the first prove
triumphant, one can picture the Church of the future, a
separated body in doctrine and discipline and, ultimately,
undoubtedly in moral standard ; becoming more and
more alien from the main stream of progressing opinion.
With some endowment assured, and a great stimulus of
ardour and enthusiasm amongst its members, it is safe
to prophesy conspicuous activity and devotion, a rising
standard of life and obligation. One can discern a body
raising always a banner in open defiance of the newer
changes in moral law, and gathering round it as a centre
all the re-actions from the hurried progress of things,
all picturesque rallies towards the worship of an older
time, all to whom the lethargy of the decent and the
ignobly decent, and the severe technical outlook of a
scientific world, are remote and hostile. Ultimately,
no doubt, though only perhaps after centuries and
through change, both on the one side or the other,
some kind of working union can be prophesied between
this isolated Church on the one hand and the Church
which at present centres in Rome on the other ; both
fighting a battle for preservation in the midst of a
civilisation entering upon that " positive " stage which
is the hall-mark of old age and coming death. Such
is the anticipation of that most courageous and in-
dividual of all social prophets, Mr. H. G. Wells ; who
sees in the "New Republic" the Catholic or Roman
Catholic the sole form of Christianity surviving, gather-
ing round it all the ardours and devotions which
still maintain a condition of revolt against the

320

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

furious energies and purposes of the new scientific
creed.

There is, however, an equally probable alternative.
" The nation looked at from the secular side is the
State," wrote Bishop Creighton, " looked at from the
religious side, it is the Church ; and separation between
the two is impossible." Development upon these other
lines would herald a process of adjustment of the
Church's formularies and discipline, through violent
and bitter change, to the common sense of the time.
One can foresee the vanishing of much that appears
outworn. Ancient prayers and articles would be thrown
over as out of date. Creeds would be modified towards
a studied vagueness. Petition would be adjusted
towards conceptions of a reign of law in nature, and a
time of security in society. Such changes might in-
volve cataclysms. But there is no cataclysm (even to
a clean sweep of the Bench of Bishops, or the driving
out of a half or a third of the clergy from their livings)
to which the Church's past history is unable to afford a
parallel. It is possible to picture a Church of the future
after the work of "adjustment" had been completed. It
would be a Church in close touch with the stream of domi-
nant opinion, with a flexible adaptation to changing con-
ditions. It would still be playing a vital part in all
" national " celebrations, with a chaplain for the prayers
of Parliament and the pomp of Coronation for King or
President. One sees a progress towards a compre-
hensive vagueness, with a diffused philanthropy and
humanitarian sentiment, rather than any high spiritual
ardour. It would be much occupied in distribution of
alms, and communications from the nation of the
wealthy to the differentiated nation of the poor.
There would seem, under these conditions, no inherent

321 T

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

obstacle to the fulfilment of the genial visions of James
Mill : with a Church " without dogmas or ceremonies,"
and the clergy employed to give lectures on ethics,
botany, political economy, and so forth, besides holding
Sunday meetings, with decent dances, specially invented,
and "social meals," with tea and coffee substituted for
bread and wine. Nor would moral adjustments fail to
follow the intellectual ; and the vision of " the sleeper "
in the popular novel, waking in the days to come, and
cheered by conversation with " one of the subsidiary
wives of the Bishop of London," might not prove
entirely a fantastic dream.

For if there is one thing manifest in the world of
thought to-day in England, it is the steady if silent
collapse of the foundations of the ancient national faith.
The intellectual position once changed, it is but a
matter of time for the actions and limitations to collapse
also. The new morality is already commencing to
regard as things trivial or tedious those survivals
which have lost intelligible meaning, and are merely
maintained by the inertia of the resistance of the
average man to disturbance. Many years ago
Matthew Arnold had excited a violent hatred by
the candour of his diagnosis. "Its organisations,"
he asserted of the popular Protestantism, "strong and
active as they look, are touched with the finger of
death ; its fundamental ideas, sounding forth still every
week from thousands of pulpits, have in them no
sympathy and no power for the progressive thought of
humanity." Ardent desire for its fulfilment doubtless
had ante-dated the prophecy. The leisured and wealthy
classes were to shed their conventional religion as a
garment at one end of the scale. At the other, the

322

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

great mass of the "populace" were to develop into
aggressive and self-conscious life, without even having
entered the universe of religious experience. But,
between these, the successful and expanding middle
classes were for many decades to dominate the national
life and policy, and impart to that life their peculiar
flavour and tone, and establish their definite type of
Puritan civilisation; so that one extremity of society
would grow ashamed of violation of its moral mandates,
the other afraid. That great tradition of austerity and
reticence which, alarmed at the demand for fuller
existence and the large curiosity of the Elizabethan
Age, had " entered the prison of Puritanism and had
the key turned upon its spirit for two hundred years,"
emerged at last with the vigour of the stored- up
energies of generations of clean living. It found its
qualities triumphant in a commercial age. Never did
the prospects of Protestantism look fairer than in the
age in which Arnold was announcing its dissolution.
It had torn its way into the Universities and public
services, from which it had been excluded. It had
re-entered, it had in a sense absorbed, the main current
of the national life. It had woven into the very fabric
of the national system of Education a religious teaching
entirely acceptable to its desires.

But, in essentials, we can now see that Arnold was
right. In the triumph lay the seeds of decay. The
coming out into the open day had meant of necessity
the exposure to the disintegrating forces of the rain and
sun. The old religion, with its affirmations and denials,
of Protestant and of Puritan England the civilisation
definitely dependent upon that particular outlook on the
world is to-day visibly dissolving. Within a generation
its dominant doctrines have been quietly cast aside.

323

Predestination and Calvinism, in their unflinching
forms, have practically gone. Even in Scotland, with
its relentless logic, the true home of its birth, they are
repudiated by the main stream of the Presbyterian
tradition. In England they seek refuge in the remoter
Christian sects. And the new Calvinism of the natural
sciences, with its blind forces and destinies, more in-
exorable and terrible even than the ancient conception
of an inflexible directing Will, has not yet entered into
the schemes of any of the popular religions. Gone,
also, is that doctrine of Everlasting Punishment in a
lake of material fire, to which are immediately com-
mitted at the moment of death all those who have not
accepted the scheme of salvation. A few years ago,
the most typical figure of English Protestantism, Mr.
Charles Spurgeon, could thus picture to his terrified
audience the "Resurrection of the Dead":

" When thou diest thy soul will be tormented alone :
that will be a hell for it ; but at the day of judgment
thy body will join thy soul, and then thou wilt have
twin-hells, thy soul sweating drops of blood and thy
body suffused with agony. In fire exactly like that
which we have on earth, thy body will lie asbestos-like,
for ever unconsumed, all thy veins roads for the feet of
pain to travel on, every nerve-string on which the devil
shall for ever play his diabolical tune of hell's unutterable
lament."

From what representative Nonconformist pulpit could
a similar statement be put forth to-day ? The change
has come, and with a rush, within a lifetime.

And going or gone, also, before the labours of a per-
sistent critical method, is that belief in a literal and
verbal inspiration of the books of the Hebrew Scriptures,
which invested with the glamour of a Divine origin

324

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

every tangled genealogy ; and accepted esoteric meaning
for every unedifying incident ; and discerned the Mosaic
code as originating in the writings of the finger of God
upon tables of stone, amid the thunders and lightnings
of Mount Sinai.

With these recognised changes within the fold have
gone larger changes amongst those outside, who never
accepted with whole-hearted conviction the affirmations
of the faithful. To these the abandonment of Calvinism
has meant the practical repudiation of any directing will
in human affairs. The repudiation of the fear of Hell
has meant the fading of any conception of retribution
for the sins done in the flesh the future apprehended
as an unending sleep, or the asphodel and lilies of a
good-tempered God. And the work of criticism has
meant the destruction of all authority in the Hebraic
or Christian scheme of life, a rejection of all evidence
of a special Divine revelation. The conception of sin
has changed from that of "a monster to be mused
on" into "an impotence to be got rid of"; and
effort towards the increase of enjoyment, personal or
general, is set forth as the foundation of the new ethical
code.

These changes are being assisted by the natural
development inherent in an age of security and
triumphant material success. The menace of social
upheavals, ruin, and the breaking up of laws, sounds
faint and far away. In the life of the cities the
forces which make for disturbance the larger dis-
quietudes, Nature and the wind that blows from the
hills, the insistent presence of the Dead are being
effectively banished. To-day the older austerity is
deliquescing into an increasing, if still half-timid,

325

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

determination to throw off the ancient restraints. The
insistence on the English Sunday of silence and
spiritual exercises ; the whole-hearted condemnation of
the theatre, dancing, card-playing, all literature and art
unsteeped in reticence ; the hatred of the public-house,
of betting and gambling ; the branding of the supreme
viciousness of any violation of the monogamic order of
society, or an union unblest by Church and State all
this belongs to a vanishing England. The march of
change is not everywhere evident. There are occasional
rallies, and fortresses which still present an unyielding
front to a change branded as a National Apostasy. But
each year and each day exhibit some subtle advance, as
one man after another realises that the sanction has
vanished for some particular restraint, and that nothing
is keeping him from pursuing the desirable course but
the forces of custom and routine.

This is not to say, indeed, that the whole fabric of
the Protestant religion is immediately collapsing in
England ; or that the great Nonconformist bodies, in
which that Protestantism is most conspicuously vocal,
are about to wither into nothingness. It is to say, on
the one hand, that an increasing population is developing,
to whom the doctrines of Protestantism are unbelievable,
and the practical worship that is dependent upon these
doctrines repugnant; on the other, that, within those
bodies themselves, there is fermenting a large process of
change. There will be " Independents " and " Bap-
tists" and "Methodists" at the close of the century.
But the Methodism will not be that of Mr. Hugh Price
Hughes, nor the Independence that of Dr. Binney, nor
theBaptist's faith that of Mr. Charles Spurgeon. Itwould
be foolish to assert that all is loss or all is gain in this

326

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

momentous change. There is, indeed, a liberation from
restraint, an advance towards freedom, combined with a
wider culture and curiosity, and a general mellowing
and humanising of individual life. But there is a loss
also in the dying away of a contempt for pleasure, and
a consciousness of purpose in the world, and of the
infinite difference between good and evil, and the in-
finite value of the human soul. Mr. Burden, in Mr.
Belloc's story, the sturdy ironmonger of Upper Norwood,
has been the butt of all the sharp wits and satires of the
age. He is at least a more reputable figure than his
son, Cosmo, with his weak thirst for ineffectual plea-
sure, or Mr. Barnett and Lord Benthorpe and Mr.
Harbury, with their cant of an expanding Empire and
Imperial destinies, and their inner cheerlessness and
greed.

Such are some of the things now in England in peril
of change the Landed System, the Established Church,
the Popular Religion. There is opportunity for a states-
man who would rightly apprehend the situation, and
definitely interpret to the nation the danger of the
collapse of ruins. Yet, confronting present affairs and
the temper of the people, one can but emphasise some-
thing of the almost forlorn heroism of the enterprise.
The land implicates a thousand vested interests, crying
if assailed. The falling feudalism is backed by the
wealth of the newer commerce. The increasing cities
care nothing for the ruin of rural England. In the
country, every day weakens the forces essential to
reform. Twenty or fifteen years ago, those vanishing
villages could still be kindled by some intelligible hope.
The " Land for the People " was a popular watchword,
influential, at least, at successive elections. To-day

327

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

another generation has fled the fields ; and written all
over the crumbling buildings and passionless people, is
the apathy which is content to wait for the end. From
what unimaginable crevasses of the city labyrinths so
runs the obvious challenge from what secluded hamlets
removed from all the past destruction, are you going to
lure forth the companies of stout peasants and yeomen
with energies adequate to the England of your dreams ?
Compared to this, the work in Ireland was child's play ;
yet in Ireland the transformation was effected only after
one of the fiercest fights in all history, an incredible
suffering, an incredible devotion of a whole nation pro-
longed through twenty years. What species of " Land
League" or united "Nationalist" party, fighting for
Agrarian Reform, is probable or possible in the England
of to-day ?

Nor is the question of the Establishment any more
hopeful. Here is an organisation to be torn up, whose
roots reach deep down into the basis of society. A
thousand hazardous questions immediately arise. What
of the future, of endowments, of fabrics, the care or
ownership of cathedrals and village churches ? From
what material, with what qualification, are you to
construct the living Church that is to remain after all
your efforts ? What again of the great Dissenting
bodies, and their claim to represent at least a vigorous
portion of the religious life of the nation ? What of
adjustment of formulas and obligations, of marriage
laws, Thirty-nine Articles, or the Apostles' or Athauasian
Creed? Here is a task, compared to which the mere
denouncing of the Concordat in France appears but a
little thing; a task, indeed, which might appear only
possible in the white hot fires of revolution.

Yet in all these, as was said at another time in peril
328

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

of change standing still is the one thing more im-
possible than going forward.

Ingenious efforts are often attempted to disentangle
historical parallels to the present in the past, and from
these to emphasise confidence or disquietude concerning
the future. Writers have recounted the story of these latter
days in England in the language of Gibbon concerning
the dying Roman Empire. Here, also, can be found agri-
culture declining at home, and all the people crowding
into the capital ; fed from the corn ships of Alexandria
or Argentina. Here, too, is the decay in the ancient
austerities and pieties ; the sudden and intoxicating
consciousness of a supreme greatness, of an Imperialism
exacting tribute from the four corners of the earth ; and
the breeding of a parasitic race of little street-bred
people, demanding before all things food and pleasure :
free meals and professional games and vicarious " little
wars." The menace is not lacking also, as in the
famous forebodings of the Koman historian, in the rise
of shadowy and inscrutable nations, the barbarians in
the cold North. In the East are the yellow races
awakening from slumber. In the West is the newest-
born child of all the hardiest of the peoples. Each may
be able, not only through the old methods of actual
invasion, but in the new methods of trade competition,
to strike a fatal blow at the heart of Empire.

Others have found a similarity between the com-
mencement of the sixteenth and the commencement of
the twentieth centuries in England. In the former
as in the later day a Church, heavily weighted with
the burden of the things of a dead past, is
struggling towards internal reform. A new learning has
suddenly rolled back the dim horizons and boundaries of

329

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

thought, and opened limitless vistas. And in those
days also, a moment's breathing space was given before
the changes in the world of thought became translated
into the world of action, and the new knowledge crashed
into the chaos of the Reformation.

Others, again, have found much that the observer
would do well to study in comparing the England of
to-day with the France of the years immediately pre-
ceding the Revolution. An increasing burden of national
expenditure, and the development of an absentee land-
lordism, there hastened the coming of change. A kind
of general atrophy of governing power amongst the
governing classes had ensured the failure of the forces
of resistance. An improvement of economic condition
in a momentary "Age of Gold " had brought hope to
those dim and submerged classes among which hope
rarely comes. And, indeed, one can realise that if only
hope hope, that most dangerous of all revolutionary
forces were once to penetrate among the poor of the
cities of England, some explosion of elemental forces might
boil up beneath the thin layer of the ordered society of
to-day, and again amid the furnace flame reveal the
" heights and depths which are still in man."

A deeper examination in each case will show the im-
possibility of thus interpreting the future from the
lessons of the past. Never before has met together that
particular combination of forces which in any particular
age, in their contact and interaction, are creating a new
world. The new world of the future we confront with as
little knowledge of its possibilities as was possessed by
any prophet of the past. In the time immediately
before centuries of quiet men foretold the beginnings
of a universal desolation, the coming of the twilight

330

IN PERIL OF CHANGE

of the gods. On the verge of vast and shattering
cataclysms men proclaimed that never was the sky
more serene, the continuance of security more sure.

Examination of the actual present can but emphasise
evidence of equilibrium disturbed. The study of the
past can but guarantee that through rough courses or
smooth, heedless of violence and pain, in methods
unexpected and often through hazardous ways, equi-
librium will be attained.

331

The substance of much of this book has appeared in
the " Contemporary Review," the "Independent Review,"
the "Commonwealth" the "Speaker," the "Pilot,"
and the " Daily News." I am indebted to the courtesy
of the editors for permission to make use of it in this
volume.

UNWIN BBOTHEBB, LIMITED, THE OHESHAM PRESS, WOKINQ AMD LONDON.

University of California

SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY

305 De Neve Drive - Parking Lot 17 Box 951388

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90095-1388

Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed.

MAY 1 2007

Date Due

762 6

Library Bureau Cat. No. 1137

Vv \vJU(s~J*^*- I

~*J3(

A-